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RECITAL REVIEW
October 10, 2004
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By David Bithell
In part as preparation for their upcoming performance at the Nuovi Spazi Musicali festival in Rome, pianist Sarah Cahill and percussionist Christopher Froh performed a varied program Sunday afternoon at the Berkeley Arts Festival Gallery, featuring recent music by several Bay Area composers and others, as part of this year's Festival. The musicians gave solos and duos highlighting their devotion to presenting great performances of interesting new work. Both active and important figures locally, nationally, and internationally, Sarah Cahill and Christopher Froh have individually fostered the creation of numerous compositions for their respective instruments.
The first work on the concert was by the most conceptually provocative. Sardinian composer (now teaching at UC Davis), Luciano Chessa. His duet Petrolio, written this year, invokes pastoral simplicity with futurist references. Lyric and modal piano writing is punctuated with various friction-based percussion techniques. Tam-tam scraping, vibraslap bowing, using an electric fan on the strings of the piano, and rubbing a cord attached to the head of a tom tom (an actual futurist technique, the basis of many of Luigi Russolo's famous “intonarumori”) all act as a kind of musical “other” – unquantifiable and intriguing. The very surface nature of these extended techniques gives the piece a sense of oscillation, as if the listener is constantly alternating between two distinct languages. This was subtly realized by Cahill and Froh as they carried forward the implicit drama of this music.
The duo also performed three movements from Cindy Cox's six-movement work Four Studies of Light and Dark (the four studies are surrounded by two framing movements, to total six). Here, due in part to the limited percussion instrumentation available at the concert in Rome, they played just the two framing movements and the first study. While the form of the work as a whole was thrown off balance by this necessity, the individual movements were played with a clarity of intent that intersected well with the internal formal structure. In particular, the first movement deals with the repetition of rather mechanical gestures and timbres reminiscent of some of John Cage's “Sonatas and Interludes” for prepared piano. In this movement a single piano preparation (the lodging of a dime between the strings of one note) interacted with a variety of smaller percussion instruments including cowbells, triangles, log drums, and woodblocks. The form is more fluid than that of the Cage and the repetitions are quirky and interesting.
Of the solo works on the concert, several stood out. The Language of Pilots, a work for solo percussion, composed by Christopher Burns and premiered this afternoon by Froh, balanced proudly between the frenetic world of the new complexity and a sort of manic free jazz. While fully notated, the intensity and nuance of the rhythmic language had the impact of a brilliant improvisation. This was amplified by the instrumentation, a snare drum and a hi hat cymbal, reaching clearly into the realm of popular music. A detailed investigation of the timbral and textural possibilities of the limited instrumentation, the composition was propelled by Froh's equally detailed realization. The command with which he performed gave a strong and clear voice to this new, difficult and rewarding work. Another good example of this physical engagement came in Christopher Froh's performance of Laurie San Martin's solo marimba composition Linea Negra from 2004. San Martin's piece is a well-crafted, though conceptually safe work in which overlapping layers of pulsed repeating notes undergo a variety of tempo shifts and harmonic transformations. Froh's performance clearly elevated the work and gave it a distinct gestural and dynamic shape through his physically committed movement. Cahill managed a similar feat in her performance of Tania Leon's Mistica written in 2003. The work sounded the oldest on the program, with a harmonic and gestural language mired in mid-century modernism. Sarah Cahill maintained a fiery intensity and helped to bring shape to this otherwise unclear and dense work. The actual “classic” work on the program was John Adams' China Gates written for Cahill in 1977. She observed that this music has a sense of nostalgia surrounding it, which is certainly the case. In large part this is because this is a music that we now know and understand – there isn't a need to question its validity, or much difficulty in understanding its structure. In particular, Adams' music from this time seems to evoke this “aura,” in part because his processes aren't particularly rigid. The fluidity and relaxed certainty that Cahill brought to the piece made it a gentle gem.
(David Bithell is a composer/performer based in the East Bay whose work explores the connections between music, theater, and language. He is co-director of the sfSoundSeries.)
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Sarah Cahill