Almost exactly two months ago, the Piano Talks concert series organized by the Ross McKee Foundation and arranged by Executive Director Nicholas Pavkovic presented a solo piano recital by Sarah Cahill performing on the Fazioli grand piano at the home of Bill Rudiak (also known for his participation on the Board of Directors for Old First Concerts). Yesterday evening Cahill returned to that instrument for the weekly Piano Break series, also supported by the McKee Foundation. The Piano Talks program presented three women composers from three different centuries. At yesterday evening’s performance the program presented five living composers, four of whom were female. The streamed video has now been archived as a YouTube Web page.
Most notable was the opening selection, the four-movement suite Piano Poems composed on a commission by Cahill for Regina Harris Baiocchi. There was a video of Baiocchi describing her composition before Cahill played it, giving its world premiere performance. This was one of those cases where a printed program would have been a great asset. Baiocchi’s summary of the poetic texts that inspired the music went by so fast that one could barely recall anything about them that might pertain to the music Cahill was playing. Being able to read about the poems, their content, and their authors would have guided the attentive ear through Cahill’s performance of the music. Instead, one could simply appreciate Cahill’s adept negotiation of the many elaborate phrases encountered in Baiocchi’s score.
Two of the other works on Cahill’s program provided me with the opportunity to revisit music I had experienced at previous Cahill recitals. Mary Watkins’ “Summer Days” was also commissioned by Cahill, who performed it during the duo recital she had presented for Old First Concerts with violinist Kate Stenberg, also about two months ago. Cahill again presented a video of Watkins discussing the images of children at play in the summer that had inspired her music, and memories of that last performance were readily brought back to consciousness.
George Lewis on the cover of his Endless Shout album, which included Sarah Cahill playing the title composition (from the album’s AllMusic Web page)
The other “recollection” involved a much greater gap of time. I first listened to Cahill play George Lewis’ four-movement suite Endless Shout when she gave a Faculty Artist Series recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music a little over four years ago. This time it was Cahill herself that raced through a description of the four movements, leaving me wishing that I could have been reading printed text while listening to her performance. As I had previously observed, each movement evokes the memory of one of the great stride pianists from the history of early jazz. Stride accounts for only a few recordings in my jazz collection; but I could still appreciate Lewis’ evocation of the likes of James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith.
Reena Esmail’s “Rang de Basant” was another offering that left me craving a printed program. I later discovered that she had prepared her own program notes for the composition. Indeed, she had written two versions, one for Western readers and the other for those from her native India. The composition was relatively short, and Cahill chose it to conclude her recital. However, I wish I had discovered the background material before listening to the music!
On the other hand Aida Shirazi’s “Albumblatt” spoke for itself through Cahill’s performance with utmost clarity. The music basically involved an exploration of the many different sonorities that could be elicited from a piano. As a result, Cahill had to divide her attention between the keyboard and the interior of the instrument. This required an almost choreographic approach to performance, and watching Cahill at work was as engaging as the diversity of sonorities she elicited. Shirazi also often required raising the dampers to emphasize the reverberations associated with many of those sonorities. The entire listening experience was engaging from start to finish, facilitated by the composer’s prankish decision to appropriate a familiar term from nineteenth-century German piano music as her title.
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