Second Cahill Survey of Women Composers

courtesy of Jensen Artists

This coming Friday First Hand Records will release the second of the three volumes planned by pianist Sarah Cahill for her The Future is Female series. Readers may recall that the first of these volumes was released this past February with the title In Nature. The title of the second volume is The Dance. Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders; but, as of this writing, the album is only available for digital download.

Once again, Cahill’s journey begins in the seventeenth century, this time with five movements selected from the first suite (in the key of D minor) in the 1687 Pieces de Clavecin collection of the music of Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. (Full disclosure: I first encountered this suite when Cahill performed it for a live-stream recital that was part of the Piano Talks series presented by the Ross McKee Foundation. I was so drawn to the music that I downloaded the score and worked my way through all nine of the movements!)

There is also one selection from the nineteenth century, Clara Schumann’s Opus 20 set of variations on a theme of Robert Schumann, composed in 1853. Most of the remaining selections were composed during the twentieth century; and the album concludes with two more recent selections by Gabriela Ortiz (a prelude and etude composed in 2011) and Theresa Wong’s “She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees,” composed in 2019. That final selection is the only one being given its premiere recording. (Another disclosure: I attended Cahill’s West Coast premiere performance of this piece when she included it on an Old First Concerts recital in May of 2019.)

As might be expected, there is considerable diversity across the twentieth-century selections. Germaine Tailleferre was the only female member of Les Six, a collection of like-minded French composers that assembled around 1917. Most of the music that came out of that group was high-spirited, if not downright prankish; and Tailleferre’s dispositions were right up there with those of her male colleagues (Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc). However, Cahill’s selection was a three-movement partita composed in 1957, after Honegger had died and Poulenc had “found religion” (with the major undertaking of his Dialogues des Carmélites opera, which received its first performance in 1957). In many ways the three movements of Tailleferre’s partita serve as a reflection on the wilder times of the early twentieth century.

My personal preferences on this new collection run to the jazzier offerings. These include two of the movements from Madeleine Dring’s 1963 Colour Suite (in which, as expected, blue gets a particularly engaging movement), Betsy Jolas’ 1984 “Tango Si,” and “Peggy’s Rag” by Elena Kats-Chernin, composed in 1996). That last selection is named after the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Glanville-Hicks had died in 1990, but her home in Sydney was converted to a residency for both Australian and overseas composers. Kats-Chernin composed four rags during her own residency there, one of which was named after the composer.

The breadth of content on this new release is as extensive as that of its predecessor; and, hopefully, the current digital-only release will encourage focus on the individual compositions, rather than treating it as an album to be played from beginning to end.