Pianist Sarah Cahill and violinist Kate Stenberg (from their Old First Concerts event page)
Yesterday afternoon at Herbst Theatre, I was pleased to see that the Stenberg | Cahill Duo of violinist Kate Stenberg and pianist Sarah Cahill used their half-hour SF Music Day slot to preview the recital they will be giving in the Old First Concerts series on Friday, October 12. I was particularly interested in listening to their approach to Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s “Tocar.” I first came to know this piece from an Ondine recording of Saariaho’s chamber works for strings. However, in January of 2017, I was fortunate enough to encounter it in performance when Benjamin Beilman included it in his Young Masters Series recital for San Francisco Performances.
“Tocar” is a Spanish verb whose primary meaning is “to touch;” but it also means “to play” when applied to a musical instrument. In the notes for the Ondine booklet by Kimmo Korhonen (translated from Finnish into English by Jaakko Mäntyjärvi), one reads that Saariaho was struck by the distinctively different techniques of “touch” required for violin and piano, respectively. The composition begins by exploiting those differences; but, as the piece progresses, the two instruments gradually move toward what amounts to a “common ground.”
Saariaho has been interested in sonorities at least since 1982, when she became a researcher at IRCAM (the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, whose name translates into Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music). “Tocar” was composed in 2010; and, through its brevity (about seven minutes in duration), it is one of the most succinct encapsulations of what Saariaho learned over the course of her research. Yesterday’s performance was a convincing account of how Saariaho had translated her insights into musical terms, with both performers acutely sensitive to the many subtle details through which that “common ground” first emerges and is then established.
Listening to the Saariaho selection prepared one for the sensitivity to sonority that could be found in the music of Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, who lived from February 5, 1909 to January 17, 1969. This was most evident in “Stained Glass Window,” a particularly striking translation of the play of light into a play of sonorities. While the second Bacewicz selection, “Melodia,” dealt with a more conventional approach to composition, one could still sense in Stenberg’s presentation of a relatively simple melody a sensitivity to the sonorities of the individual notes.
The more conventional offerings in yesterday afternoon’s slot came from Henry Cowell and Gabriela Lena Frank. Cowell composed his sonata for violin and piano in 1945, about three years after his release from San Quentin State Prison on a pardon. This was a time when he moved away from his bolder piano compositions with tone clusters in favor of “simpler rhythms and a more traditional harmonic language” (in the words of the author of his Wikipedia page). Stenberg and Cahill played the ballad and jig movements from Cowell’s sonata, both of which lived up, perfectly affably, to that Wikipedia author’s description.
That affability could also be found in two movements from Gabriela Lena Frank’s Sueños de Chambi (dreams of Chambi). This is a suite whose movements were inspired by the work of the Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi. The subtitle of the suite is Snapshots for an Andean Album. Each of the two movements played yesterday reflected on a particular form on Andean music, the first the harawi, which is basically a love song, and the second the Marinera, often performed as a courtship dance. (Some readers may recall that the harawi inspired a song cycle by Olivier Messiaen of the same name.) Both of these were given a distinctively more visceral account than had been found in Cowell’s sonata, and they provided a lively conclusion to the Stenberg | Cahill contribution to SF Music Day.
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