Sarah Cahill Launches Streamed Video Series

Sarah Cahill performing the recital discussed in this article (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Arium is a new video streaming service that describes itself as “a new platform for global musical storytelling.” The goal is “to showcase the highest caliber of emerging and established musicians around the world through intimate, cinematic productions of storytelling and performance.” The results of those productions are being offered free of charge. As of this writing, the home page has classified content into three categories: Salons, Featurettes, and Chamber Music. The Salons category includes a series entitled At Home With Sarah Cahill. Two episodes have been created for this series, and the first of these is now available for viewing.

The performance lasts less than half an hour. It consists of three of the selections that Cahill prepared for the virtual performance of a program entitled Celebration of the Centennial of the 19th Amendment, which took place this past March. She began with the first and third of the four pieces that Vítězslava Kaprálová collected as her Opus 13 under the title April Preludes. This was followed by Amy Beach’s “Dreaming,” the third of her 1892 Four Sketches collection, Opus 15.

Cahill’s performance, which included brief background descriptions of her selections, was filmed at her home in Berkeley, California. She played a Mason & Hamlin piano, which had previously been owned by Terry Riley. Riley gave the piano to her as a gift, and it arrived only a few days before the filming session.

The Beach selection was inspired by a phrase by Victor Hugo: “You call me from the depths of a dream.” By this time I have listened to enough of Beach’s music to appreciate the diversity of her styles. This particular piece was decidedly Lisztian in its rhetoric, but the rhetorical level was mostly occupied by rich embellishments. Beach definitely had a better sense of brevity than one tends to encounter in Liszt, and Cahill’s interpretation made it a point to make sure that the embellishments did not overwhelm the thematic material being embellished.

Kaprálová was one of the thirteen female composers surveyed by the Spanish pianist Antonio Oyarzabal for his album La Muse Oubliée (the forgotten muse), which was released this past April. She was a child prodigy that began composing at the age of nine, but she died tragically at the age of 25. The Opus 13 preludes were completed about three years before her death, and they were dedicated to the pianist Rudolf Firkušný.

Readers may recall that Sony Classical released an anthology of all the recordings that Firkušný made for both RCA and Columbia. While I was glad that this collection included compositions by Leoš Janáček and Bohuslav Martinů, I am disappointed (but not surprised) that Kaprálová was left by the wayside. The two movements that Cahill played were rich in original approaches to both polyphony and rhythm, leaving me hoping that I shall have a chance to listen to her play all four of the preludes some time in the near future.