On 23 September Anton Lukoszevieze and Apartment House present the Spanish debut of Cassandra Miller’s Grace’s Amazing Imitation Apartment for cello and piano at the Ensems International Festival of Contemporary Music in Valencia. The 8-minute work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society through the generous support of an anonymous donor. It premiered at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival in May 2025 and made its London debut in June at Café OTO, as part of a programme celebrating Apartment House’s thirty-year anniversary.
Miller’s work draws on three musical sources, transfigured as ever by her own practices of creative transcription: the hymn Amazing Grace, Erik Satie’s Socrate (performed by Apartment House alongside the work at its premiere) and John Cage’s 1976 composition Apartment House 1976 – an idiosyncratic commemoration of the US bicentenary. The Norwich premiere was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s The New Music Show – listen here.
The piece sees the cello float in its highest register, with a free use of harmonics from the player; the piano plays resonant, fanfare-like cascades of chords underneath this line. “Phrases begin and end suddenly with no tapering”, Miller writes, “as if turning on and off a light switch; opening and closing a door to a sound world.”
Miller’s Swim, a 16-minute work inspired by Robert Schumann and Anne Carson, will make its US, French and Spanish debuts in in the 25/26 season. In December it appears with Tianyi Lu and the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesta, CA, and with Bas Wiegers and the Orchestre National de Metz; on 30 January 2026 it will debut with the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya and Ludovic Morlot, who together recorded Miller’s La Donna in 2023. The work imagines Schumann going for a swim, evoking the repetitive motion of his arms, and letting his psyche dissolve in the deep water – not of the river Rhine, but rather a cool Canadian lake described by poet Anne Carson.