Last night pianist Sarah Cahill presented the first Faculty Artist Series recital for the academic year at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). She was joined by pianist Regina Myers for the entire program, which included music for both four hands on one keyboard and two pianos. For one selection, “The Girl in My Alphabet” by Errollyn Wallen, they were joined by two more pianists, Monica Chew and Jerry Kuderna, making for eight hands divided equally between two keyboards. Wallen was one of four to be highlighted through Cahill’s ongoing promotion of works by female composers, the other three being Eleanor Alberga, Meredith Monk, and Elena Kats-Chernin. All of these compositions were relatively short in duration; but the program concluded with the world premiere performance of “Up,” a four-movement 35-minute composition with thematic material alternating between two pianos. Cahill and Myers jointly commissioned this work, which was composed by SFCM alumnus Riley Nicholson.
One might describe “Up” as an imaginative study in turning semantics into music. Nicholson’s paragraph for the program notes almost flooded the attentive reader with a plethora of interpretations of that two-letter word, all of which had musical implications. It should be no surprise that it took him over half an hour to account for them all. Nevertheless, this was no idle “laundry list” to diverse items. It would have been distracting for a listener to try to check off all the alternatives Nicholson had written into his paragraph. Instead, one could appreciate the intense flow of differing phrase structures with occasional quiet interludes to keep the attentive listener from the fatigue of sorting out all those differences. 35 minutes may have seemed like a long time when the piece was introduced; but, as the attentive listener got caught up in the overall flow, it is unlikely that (s)he/they would have checked a watch to monitor the overall progress.
Equally engaging was the eight-hand “The Girl in My Alphabet.” This was one of those “surprise” pieces that built up to a clever punch line. That punch line amounted to a clear account of “The Girl from Ipanema” emerging out of thick and highly chromatic textures of repetitive motifs. This recalled Benjamin Britten’s approach to “reverse” variations on a theme, beginning with rich embellishment and progressing to simpler and simpler forms until only the theme itself remains.
Sarah Cahill (left) and Regina Myers playing Meredith Monk’s “Ellis Island” (photograph by Michael Strickland)
The other two-piano composition was “Ellis Island,” composed by Monk in 1981 for a film of the same title. Monk recorded this piece by herself, using overdubbing to account for the two parts, and it became the first of several works in this genre through which she explored the diversity of textures that can emerge from blending two pianos through a variety of techniques. When the music was released on its own for an ECM album, Monk described the recording as “a film for the ears.”
Many readers probably know that my appreciation of Alberga’s music was cultivated by listening opportunities afforded during the pandemic. Indeed, a live-streamed performance of her second string quartet performed by the Telegraph Quartet included a video of a telephone interview. It was easy for me to appreciate the influence of her Jamaican origins as a parallel to the Hungarian influences on the music of Béla Bartók. However, I was not prepared for the jazzy rhetoric of “3-Day Mix,” the four-hand composition that opened last night’s program. This could not have been a more refreshing “warm-up” offering, whose high spirits would later emerge with the same energy in the “Dance of the Paper Umbrellas” by Kats-Chernin.
As I continue to attend Cahill’s performances, I have come to appreciate her never-a-dull-moment gift for preparing programs; and that gift delivered in full force last night.
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