Saturday, June 6, 2020

O1C “Returns to the Music” in Cyberspace

Almost exactly a month ago, Old First Concerts (O1C) informed those on its electronic mailing list of its intention to host three Friday night solo concerts in June. The initial plan was to host the concerts at Old First Church, selling tickets and seating the audience in ways that would maintain the constraints of social distancing. In less than a week the plan was augmented to include a fourth solo concert.

By the end of May, it was clear that a “physical” concert would not be feasible under prevailing conditions. As a result, plans were modified to present the offerings as a series of live stream concerts. The Web page through which tickets could be ordered was updated with two hyperlinks. One led to the live stream Web page on YouTube, and the other connected to a PDF file of the concert program that would have been handed out under normal concert procedure. All of the live stream events could be attended at no charge.

Sarah Cahill (photograph by Marianne Larochelle, from the O1C event page)

Last night this endeavor “officially” got under way with a recital by pianist Sarah Cahill. O1C Director Matthew Wolka provided a few introductory remarks from the Old First sanctuary and explained that Cahill would be performing from the home of one of the O1C board members. Cahill’s instrument was a Fazoli piano with a rich sound that could sustain itself through any of the bandwidth limitations imposed by YouTube. This made for a satisfying listening experience, although Cahill’s remarks were delivered through a microphone with low amplitude level (perhaps to avoid feedback with the microphones deployed for the piano). This just meant that any viewer would have to adjust to “riding the volume control” at the appropriate moments.

Cahill’s program was the latest installation in her The Future is Female project. My last encounter with this project took place a little less than a year ago, when she performed 90 minutes of music by women composers for last summer’s Flower Piano music festival on July 14, 2019. On that occasion I observed that every selection on her program was new to me. This time the “familiarity factor” went up to three pieces previously encountered; but all of those encounters were Cahill performances.

The Flower Piano program covered music composed as early as 1811 and as recent of 2019. Last night’s program selections resided primarily in the twentieth century with two pieces from the current one. The composition most firmly etched in my memory was the chaconne that Sofia Gubaidulina composed as a student in 1962 but has not yet been included in her personal catalog of compositions. (It is, on the other hand, cited on her Wikipedia page.) I first encountered the piece when Cahill presented a San Francisco Performances Salon at the Hotel Rex in December of 2016, entitling her program Chaconnes, Revisited. I suspect that the power of my memory derives, at least in part, from the fact that I happened to be turning pages for Cahill on that occasion, responding to a last-minute request!

Cahill’s program note described this piece as “an homage to Bach,” noting that the normal iterations of chaconne form are extended to accommodate a toccata and a fugue. Nevertheless, my own opinion is that Gubaidulina’s richly virtuosic approach to what began as a theme-and-variations dance form was informed as much by Ferruccio Busoni as it was by Johann Sebastian Bach. After all, Busoni had composed an arrangement of the chaconne that concludes the BWV 1004 solo violin partita that resulted in some of the most flamboyant piano music in the repertoire. Thus, on my last encounter with Gubaidulina’s piece, I wrote that she “set herself to do unto Busoni what Busoni had done unto Bach, and one gets the impression that she did so with gleeful prankishness.” That prankishness may not have been visible in Cahill’s physical demeanor. Nevertheless, the clarity of her interpretation left me chuckling as if I was sharing an old joke with an old friend.

Another “revisited” piece was the last one on the program, “Peggy’s Rag” by Elena Kats-Chernin. Kats-Chernin is based in Australia; and “Peggy” is the Australian composer, Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Her path led from Australia to London and then to New York to get away from World War II. She lived in the United States long enough to receive citizenship, and between 1949 and 1955 she worked for Virgil Thomson as a music critic for the New York Herald Tribune.

As a result, there are more than a few hints of American influences in Kats-Chernin’s brief “rag” (which is never quite ragtime); and the piece allowed Cahill to conclude her program in high spirits. Those high spirits had began to emerge in the scherzo by Grażyna Bacewicz that preceded “Peggy’s Rag.” This was the third of the pieces I had previously encountered, and its vigorous energy was reminiscent to the spunky outrageousness found in the early music of Dmitri Shostakovich before he ran afoul of Soviet authority.

Among the “first encounter” offerings, memory tended to be strongest when there was some thread of familiarity. This was the case with Margaret Bonds’ “Troubled Water,” which was basically a fantasia on the spiritual “Wade in the Water.” More adventurous was “Yeah Yeah Yeah” by Lois V Vierk. Those of my generation will immediately associate that title with one of the early Beatles hits, “She Loves You.” Indeed, the pianist is required to sing some of that tune while working through an avalanche of intricate embellishments. Those embellishments are so extraordinary that they almost seem to have more to do with Led Zeppelin (“Stairway to Heaven”) than with the Beatles. Nevertheless, the listener should be encouraged to take her/his pleasures in what (s)he finds!

Among the remaining offerings, a three-movement partita by Germaine Tailleferre, which she composed in 1957, came across as a sentimental reflection of her younger days, when she was the only female member of Les Six in Paris. Unlike most pre-classical partitas, none of the movements were based on dance forms; but, in contrast, dance made a brief but memorable appearance in Betsy Jolas’ “Tango Si.” (Jolas had studied with Darius Milhaud, one of Tailleferre’s Les Six colleagues.)

Most enigmatic was Elizabeth A. Baker’s “Four Planes.” Baker provided her own program note for this piece. It turned out to be of little help to prepare for listening. Cahill was more informative by showing the actual materials with which she was working to prepare her performance. Nevertheless, both explanations were brief; and I have yet to make the connection between the theoretical ideas I had encountered and the listening experience that was based on practice.

Cahill also had time to add an encore. (This was not a response to the applause of an appreciative audience.) She played a prelude by the African-American composer Julia Perry, written in 1946 and revised in 1962. Perry is another one of those twentieth-century voices that has received very little attention. Sadly, there are way too few opportunities to listen to her music, which should dispirit anyone aware that she wrote twelve symphonies in her lifetime!

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