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RECITAL REVIEW
Sarah Cahill Returns,
August 7, 2001
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By Robert P. Commanday
It was typical Sarah Cahill. In the middle of the long summer new music drought, here comes the redoubtable Sarah, long our leading composers' advocate. On Sunday, the pianist and commentator, having popped in from New York, where she's residing for two years, played one of her noteworthy concerts, at Old First Church. Characteristically, it was remarkable for her smooth pianism, rhythmic precision and command, and for the stylistic range of the program.
Her well-known catholicity, embracing musical streams from the mystical to the mathematical, was at work in her program. There's something endearing about the conviction and integrity deployed equally to the most incongruous of bedfellows. Unintentionally, no doubt, the works by the two women composers, Ursula Mamlock and Kui (pronounced Kway) Dong, stood out, head and shoulders. Both of them, as well as another of the program's five compositions, Evan Ziporyn's Pondok, had been commissioned by Cahill, and these were their West Coast premieres. Cahill had given the premieres of Dong's Earth, Water, Wood, Metal, and Fire and Ziporyn's work at the Freer Gallery in Washington D.C. last February, in connection with the Asian reference of both pieces.
For Dong's work, the cultural source is deep, natural and immediate. A Beijing native (34, currently a Stanford doctoral candidate) and composer of ballet, film, and television scores in China, in Earth, Water..., she reveals a distinctive sound and sensibility, with a particular ear for color and sonority. This is apparent differently in each movement: the machine-gun chord alternations of upper register chords in the dramatically contrastive "Earth" movement, the delicacy of the figurations, recalling Debussy, in "Water."
Pencils wedged between some of the piano strings for "Wood," result in fascinating echoing harmonics as Cahill struck the keys sharply. With metal rods similarly placed for "Metal," Cahill set up a ringing clangor, the resultant sonorities suggesting Chinese music unmistakably. "Fire" ends the work forcefully, with rapid chord alternations expanding and actually developing harmonically.
Ursula Mamlok, a senior and established composer, wrote 2000 Notes for Cahill (and acknowledged in introductory remarks that it turned out to have 3500 notes). This is music with strongly defined ideas and expressive content, all the more so because its four short movements are so concentrated and tightly structured– in utter contrast to the remaining three works on the program. The first movement has a bold character, its principal idea the stronger for being widely disjunct, the second one, fast, scurrying and with real fantasy. In the other movements a sense of melody is achieved by the implied connections of notes within the texture. And Cahill masters the rhythmic and linear complexity in such textures. Kyle Gann, critic for the Village Voice and teacher (now at Bard College), contributed Time Does Not Exist (it actually did, about 15 minutes' worth), the title from Freud. It is meditative in character and traverses a broad arc, returning at the end to the refined lines in the slow and open three-part counterpoint with which it begins. There is a time-symbol motive, an obsessively repeated tone or pedal in the middle register (after Ravel's Le Gibet) that could as well signal something ominous. Time... is largely meditative in character, and Cahill brings to it a certain improvisatory quality. The harmonic style is conservative, the dissonance level low. In rhythm, and to a certain degree, in phrasing, it is soothingly regular. The concept in the title, fortunately, is not literally possible in music. Figuratively, whether time stands still may depend on how actively or inactively the listener attends the music. Serenity wins. Ziporyn, a composer long involved with Balinese music, the director here of the Gamelan Sekar Jaya, 1988-90 and now on the MIT music faculty, described his piece in program notes as drawing upon memories of his stay in a Balinese "guest hut" (Pondok) 20 years ago. He utilized an element from a specific Balinese piece for each of the four movements. The motivic elements are clear, whether rhythmic, melodic or simply phrase design. In the second movement, a play on repetitive duplets with shifting accents and syncopation, is punctuated by Cahill's periodically reaching under the piano and rapping it. An unexpected American flavor derives from Ziporyn's use of a simple progression of harmonies and modal cadence associated with folk music style. The regularity of the phrasing and the harmony made for a curious cultural marriage with the Balinese elements.
In the third movement, as Cahill holds down the dampers with one hand and plays on the keys with the other, a Balinese sound is achieved. The finale, building on the duplet figure, then creates layers on layers of sonority to a big climactic ending. Written for Cahill, dedicated to her and played splendidly, Pondok is a pleasant, agreeable work but not one that gets the composer, as an individual, in touch with the listener. Perhaps that's congruent with the Balinese ethos and one reason the composer immerses himself in its art. Far, far less to find in Ingram Marshall's Authentic Presence, dedicated to the late Justin Blasdale, pianist. It is episodic, harmonically prosaic, and leans heavily on conventional piano figurations, arpeggios, left-hand octaves in heavy four-note patterns. One thing about Sarah Cahill, the breadth of her reach and inclusiveness and her relentless curiosity combine to bring a revealing range of music to the fore. (Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.) ©2001 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved |