A photograph of Sarah Cahill in the spirit of Flower Piano (photograph by Marianne Larochelle, courtesy of Jensen Artists)
As was announced about a month ago, this morning Sarah Cahill took her current ongoing project, The Future is Female, to the solo recital she performed for the Flower Piano music festival. She presented a recital slightly less than 90 minutes in duration, over the course of which she performed eight compositions, each by a different female composer. These covered a period in music history that ranged from 1811 to a composition completed earlier this year. Each composition had its own stamp of uniqueness; and all of them were unfamiliar to this writer (and probably just about everyone else in the audience this morning). Cahill provided a verbal introduction to each piece, which basically encouraged the attentive listener to follow her on what emerged as an adventurous and highly stimulating journey of discovery.
The background for the earliest composition was perhaps the most fascinating. Hélène de Montgeroult was born into an aristocratic French family and became the wife of the Marquis de Montgeroult. Her aristocratic status led to imprisonment during the Reign of Terror and could easily have then led to the guillotine. However, she performed a set of improvisations on “La Marseillaise” for the Committee of Public Safety, which then led to her release from prison. In 1795 she became the first woman to teach at the newly-formed Conservatoire de Paris. Cahill’s selection was the last in her Opus 5 publication of three piano sonatas, this one in the key of F-sharp minor. Published in 1811, the music may well have reflected admiration for Muzio Clementi and perhaps her Conservatoire colleague Luigi Cherubini. Nevertheless, it also showed signs of its own distinctive individuality.
At the other end of the time-line, Cahill played the one work on the program that I had previously encountered. This was Theresa Wong’s “She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees,” inspired by Nina Simone’s song “Images,” which, in turn, was inspired by a poem by Harlem Renaissance poet William Waring Cuney. I had attended the West Coast premiere of this piece when Cahill played it at an Old First Concerts recital on May 17 of this year. It is an energetic composition with decidedly unique approaches to both rhythm and keyboard glissando passages. However, I have to confess that “Images” is not a part of Simone’s repertoire that I have come to know; so I was pretty much obliged to take the music on its own terms, which definitely turned out to make for a satisfying listening experience.
There were two other nineteenth-century selections, each of interest in its own way. Fanny Mendelssohn was represented by two of the pieces in her Opus 2 collection published under the title Vier Lieder für das Pianoforte (four songs for the piano). The Wikipedia list of her compositions refers to this as “Songs without Words,” suggesting a “family resemblance” to the pieces published under that title by her brother Felix. Recently, musicologists have been suggesting that some of those works published by Felix were actually written by Fanny, which may explain why the publication under her name was given different wording. As a result, Cahill’s performance encouraged speculations on the brother-sister relationship that may have led to the pieces she chose to play.
The other piece from the nineteenth-century was “Un rêve en mer” (a dream at sea), the first in a set of three Morceaux de salon (salon pieces), the Opus 28 of Teresa Carreño. In her day Carreño had a 54-year concert career as a virtuoso pianist; but she was also a soprano and a conductor, as well as a composer. Cahill cited her acquaintance with Franz Liszt in introducing “Un rêve en mer;” but, considering the span of her career, it would be fair to say that Carreño knew “anyone who was anyone,” as they say. (The itemization of specific names on her Wikipedia page is nothing short of awesome.)
The twentieth century was represented by (in order of appearance) Vítězslava Kaprálová, Grażyna Bacewicz, Elena Kats-Chernin, and Chen Yi. The most interesting of these was Kats-Chernin, born in the Soviet Union in Tashkent (which is now the capital of Uzbekistan) but now living in Australia, where she is not only a pianist and composer but also an active participant in underground theatre. Cahill played “Peggy’s Minute Rag,” which was dedicated to another Australian composer, Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Readers may recall that Glanville-Hicks was represented on the album Composer-Critics of the New York Herald Tribune (where she was the only female) by her upbeat sonata for piano and percussion. Kats-Chernin’s take on ragtime has similar upbeat qualities, not to mention a wry nod to the first of Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 64 waltzes, which Chopin himself called “Valse du petit chien” (waltz for a little dog), since it was supposedly inspired by a dog chasing its own tail.
Taken as a whole, Cahill’s program was a thoroughly engaging journey into unfamiliar repertoire; and I hope I am not the only one looking forward to subsequent journeys based on further discoveries of works by female composers.
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