Sarah Cahill performing last night at Old First Presbyterian Church (screen shot from the video being discussed)
Yesterday evening pianist Sarah Cahill returned to Old First Concerts to present her latest program of music by female composers. Regular readers probably know that I was “otherwise engaged” at the time. Fortunately, the performance was live-streamed; and the resulting video is now available for viewing at any time on YouTube. The Web page for that video also includes a hyperlink for the booklet of program notes that would have been handed out to those in the audience.
There is always impressive diversity in the programs that Cahill prepares. In this case the earliest composer, Anna Bon, was born in 1738; and the first two selections were by living composers, Azerbaijani Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and British Hannah Kendall. Cahill was also kind enough to observe that Kendall’s music would be performed by the San Francisco Symphony during the coming season. This will take place on the programs to be conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen on October 7–9, which will begin with the United States premiere of Kendall’s “Tuxedo: Vasco ‘de’ Gama.”
I must confess that Cahill serves up so much in each of her programs that my own mind often seeks out a “slice of the whole pie” (so to speak) that triggers a particular line of thinking. In this particular case that line involve speculations about influence (which, in all likelihood, are little more than speculations). In this case my thoughts were triggered by Bon, who was born in 1738 and whose year of death is unknown. As her Wikipedia page observes, after she began married life in 1767, “details of her story are lost to history.”
Before that, however, in 1757, Bon published a collection of six harpsichord sonatas, her Opus 2. Cahill played the fifth of these in the key of B minor, consisting of three relatively short movements. Curiously, 1757 is the year in which Domenico Scarlatti died. One of the things I had learned about this composer of a prolific number of keyboard sonatas was that, in Ralph Kirkpatrick’s 1953 catalog, there are several “triptychs” of three consecutive sonatas, suggesting a possible origin of the three-movement sonata as we have come to know it. Thus, there is at least some possibility that Bon’s sonatas emerged through her study of Scarlatti’s.
A more remote possibility of influence involved the three-movement sonata by the Hungarian composer Agi Jambor. Born in 1909, Jambor was the winner of the 1937 International Chopin Piano Competition, held every five years in Warsaw. After the Nazis came to power, Jambor shifted her attention to the Resistance. She and her husband moved to the United States after the war in 1947. She played at the White House for President Harry Truman (another pianist); and she subsequently recorded five albums for Capitol Records between 1955 and 1957. However, the Resistance was still in her blood; and she actively opposed the demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy and the ill-fated Vietnam War. With all that context an attentive listener might be forgiven for wondering whether or not the sonata that Cahill played might have reflected at least a few influences of Sergei Prokofiev’s three piano sonatas known as the “War” sonatas, composed between 1940 and 1944.
On a more prankish side I was rather taken with the upbeat rhythms of the two movements from British composer Madeline Dring’s Colour Suite. The second of those movements was entitled “Brown Study.” In the back of my head, I could hear Zero Mostel roaring, “Brown is not a color!,” which I think took place in one of his exchanges with Gene Wilder in The Producers.
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