Sarah Cahill Launches 2024 at Old First Concerts

This afternoon I live-streamed the first performance of the new year to be presented by Old First Concerts. This was a solo piano recital by Sarah Cahill, whom I had not heard since her Flower Piano performance this past September. I can always count on Cahill to expand the boundaries of my listening experiences, and this afternoon was no exception.

Her entire program was framed by two compositions by Ann Southam, whose music she had previously performed at the Chapel of the Chimes in June of 2022. The program began with the first piece in Southam’s first Rivers Series collection, composed in 1979, and concluded with another “river-oriented” work, “Commotion Creek,” composed in 2007. As might be expected, both of these compositions evoked their subject matter through rhythmic textures, which Cahill realized with eyebrow-raising precision.

The most recent work on the program began the second half. This was Evan Ziporyn’s “You Are Getting Sleepy.” This was another richly textured composition, and I must confess that trying to follow the flow of those textures was probably the most challenging undertaking of the afternoon. Ziporyn’s offering complemented the conclusion of the first half of the program, which was Terry Riley’s “The Walrus in Memoriam.” This was a tongue-in-cheek homage to one of the weirder Beatles tunes (“I Am the Walrus”); but any quotations were deftly camouflaged by Riley’s rich counterpoint.

Excerpt from Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s thickly textured Forest Scenes (from IMSLP, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License)

The remainder of the program reflected on the early twentieth century, presenting three composers whose works had gone unrecognized for the better part of my life. The earliest of these was a five-movement suite by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor entitled Forest Scenes. Through thickly-textured keyboard writing, the music unfolds a narrative of passion between a “lone forest maiden” and a “phantom lover,” who, in the final scene, proudly “journey towards the great city.” This was followed by Amy Beach’s “A Hermit Thrush at Eve,” the first of her two Opus 92 compositions. (The title of the second is “A Hermit Thrush at Morn.”) Beach knew how to set the mood for this work without trying to emphasize any bird calls.

The last of the offerings from this period in music history consisted of three of Ruth Crawford’s piano preludes, which she composed between 1925 and 1928. Even before she met and married Charles Seeger, Crawford had established qualities as a composer; and I realized, with more than a little regret, that I have not had an opportunity to write about her since I listened to Cahill and violinist Kate Stenberg perform the duo sonata she had composed in 1926. The preludes that Cahill selected left me hoping that, on some occasion in the not-too-distant future, I shall have the opportunities to listen to all nine of the preludes played as a cycle.

Meanwhile, as always, I shall find myself waiting to see what Cahill will select for her next recital.