Piano Talk: Sarah Cahill

Readers may recall that, when I first wrote about the Piano Break series a week ago, I also apologized for having lost touch with another concert series presented by the Ross McKee Foundation and arranged by Executive Director Nicholas Pavkovic, Piano Talks. I had been aware of this series for some time; but I had not written about it since March of 2019, back in the days when pianists would perform for a physically-present audience. This series has also relocated to cyberspace, and its most recent recital was live-streamed on the evening of Wednesday, September 30. Pianist Sarah Cahill prepared a program of three women composers, Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Gabriela Ortiz; and the YouTube Web page for that concert has now been archived.

Sarah Cahill playing Gabriela Ortiz’ étude (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Each of these women represents a different century in music history. Cahill presented Jacquet de La Guerre through four movements from her D minor keyboard suite, the Prelude, the Sarabande, the Chaconne l’inconstante (the inconstant chaconne), and the Gigue. The suite was one of four composed in 1687, the others in the keys of G minor, A minor, and F major; and it is the one with the most movements (nine), the chaconne being the lengthiest of those movements. Cahill then advanced to the nineteenth century of Fanny Mendelssohn, beginning with a “blind comparison” of opening passages by both Fanny and her brother Felix. Fanny’s selection, the first in her Opus 8 Songs Without Words collection, was decidedly more imaginative than the Felix selection (left unidentified); and Cahill then played that Opus 8 selection in its entirety. The program then concluded in the current century with the third étude in the Estudios entre preludios (études between preludes) collection composed by Ortiz. This particular étude was composed as a tribute to Jesusa Palancares, a poor woman that fought in the Mexican Revolution. (The earlier études in the collection were dedicated to composers, György Ligeti and Béla Bartók, respectively.)

The result was a 40-minute program of impressive diversity. The “historical” side of my “listening self” may have had some misgivings when it came to listening to seventeenth-century music on a modern Fazioli piano; and I probably would have preferred a clearer sense of the dance rhythms in the movements that followed the prelude. On the other hand I was struck by the imaginative architecture of that prelude, beginning as a two-part invention before bringing additional voices into the mix. (In my own time at the keyboard I am currently working on the second ordre in François’ Couperin’s Pièces de clavecin, and Cahill’s sampling has definitely tempted me to seek out one of Jacquet de La Guerre’s suites as my next project.)

The remaining two works on the program definitely engaged me from beginning to end. Felix may have had uncanny facility in commanding a repertoire of keyboard embellishments, but his underlying structures tended to be more routine than patience is inclined to endure. Fanny knew how to be adventurous with overall structure beyond her impressive skills in dealing with the syntax of counterpoint and harmonic progressions. Cahill’s selection definitely made the case that her music has been unduly ignored. Ortiz, on the other hand, was a “first encounter” listening experience, leaving me curious about her other études and the preludes that interleave with them.

Cahill has been pursuing the mission of bringing women composers into the spotlight for several years, and her Piano Talk video plays a significant role in that mission and deserves to be viewed by anyone that has to hesitate before giving the name of a woman composer.