Last night at the Old First Presbyterian Church, Current: A Piano Festival, presented by the Ross McKee Foundation, continued with the second of its three installments in this month’s Old First Concerts schedule. The title of the program was Cross Rhythms, and it was the product of a weekly sharing of ideas among pianists gathered via Zoom and coordinated by Sarah Cahill during lockdown conditions. Six of those pianists performed last night, Cahill herself, along with (in alphabetical order) Allegra Chapman, Gloria Cheng, Monica Chew, Jerry Kuderna, and Regina Myers. The selections combined new music with works by women composers and composers of color.
Such programs often run the risk that too much diversity will ultimately overwhelm even the most attentive listener. Ironically, I encountered a brief ring of familiarity in one of the selections thanks to San Francisco Performances (SFP). This past July pianist Aaron Diehl made his SFP debut in a solo piano recital included in the Summer Music Sessions 2021 programming. Diehl concluded his recital with the delightfully upbeat “Dance (Juba)” from the In the Bottoms suite by Robert Nathaniel Dett. Last night Kuderna played that suite in its entirety. Even though the music was composed in 1913, he brought a stimulating freshness to the music’s jazzy rhetoric; and the familiarity of the final movement emerged as the icing on a thoroughly delicious cake.
Indeed, such freshness permeated the entire program. This was probably as much a matter of the personalized engagement of each of the pianists as it was of the variety of the selections. Cahill began the program performing the four-hand “Three-Day Mix” by Eleanor Alberga with Myers. This was the “repetitive structures” offering in the program, a genre that Cahill knows well through her performances of the works of composers such as Philip Glass and John Adams. However, Alberga (who is both a woman and a composer of color) had ideas of her own to make her selection an engaging listening experience.
The other recent selections were performed by Cheng: “Looking Above, The Faith of Joseph” by James Newton and “Recombinant” by the wife-and-husband team of Wang Lu and Anthony Cheung. There was a fair amount of name-dropping in introducing “Looking Above.” Newton’s program note acknowledged four pianists that inspired him: Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, and Yvonne Loriod (married to Olivier Messiaen and an authority in playing his piano music). Ultimately, Loriod’s was the only presence that registered during Cheng’s performance. Similarly, “Recombinant” was one of those “concept” pieces, whose text description made a deeper impression than the music itself.
Chapman presented two selections. The first of these consisted of three of the ten concert études that Grażyna Bacewicz composed in her late forties, having lived through both World War II and the death of Joseph Stalin. It is not difficult to detect a “rhetoric of relief” in her études. Sadly, however, Bacewicz herself died about a month short of her 60th birthday. Chapman’s other offering was the first scherzo composed by Adolphus Hailstork in 1996, which involved a variety of engaging rhetorical twists on a genre that many thought had become too familiar.
The program conclude with the first book in a collection of studies on African rhythms composed by Fred Onovwerosuoke. There were twelve pieces in the set. However, each glided into the next with a smoothness that recalled the sixteen waltzes collected in Johannes Brahms’ Opus 39. Chew’s performance also required her wearing ankle bells for a percussion supplement to the thematic material. As a result, a journey through an engaging diversity of rhetorics and styles was given a stimulating conclusion before any sense of fatigue could establish itself.
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