Sarah Cahill: The Future is Female, Vol. 2, The Dance
First Hand Records

Pianist Sarah Cahill clearly has a thing for big projects. Five years ago, she paid tribute to Terry Riley with an encompassing four-CD set called Eighty Trips Around the Sun (Irritable Hedgehog). These days, she's engaged in another ambitious undertaking, this one a three-volume series called The Future is Female. Comprising thirty solo piano works by women composers past and present, the project's second chapter has just arrived, loosely based on a ‘dance' theme and featuring material by Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Clara Schumann, Germaine Tailleferre, Zenobia Powell Perry, Madeleine Dring, Betsy Jolas, Elena Kats-Chernin, Meredith Monk, Gabriela Ortiz, and Theresa Wong. Whereas the first volume oriented itself around a ‘nature' theme, the final one in the series will use ‘play' as its conceptual nucleus. However important the themes are to Cahill, no one need get too worked up over them. Once the final instalment appears early next year, the project will be appreciated more for its cumulative impact and scope than for the way its contents were thematically organized.

The albums are an outgrowth of Cahill's The Future is Female project, which she initiated in 2018 and which now boasts more than seventy compositions. The impetus for the project grew out of the realization that while she had forged relationships with many living composers, she'd given less attention to neglected composers from the past; further to that, she came to realize how much the classical canon underrepresented women composers as well as those of colour. The Future is Female is, therefore, Cahill's humble attempt to correct that imbalance. Her advocacy extends beyond the recording studio, incidentally, as she's performed evening-length recitals of the material as well as marathons that run from four to seven hours.

The collection unfolds chronologically, with five of the nine movements from de la Guerre's Suite No. 1 in D Minor, itself from her Pièces de Clavecin (1687), the earliest work featured and Wong's She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees from 2019 the latest. The material by de la Guerre is striking in its sophistication and daring, almost disarmingly so when one considers the writing originates from the late-seventeenth century. Certainly the music echoes its time, yet there's an audacity to the writing, whether it's the graceful “Sarabande” or lively “Gigue,” that's undeniable.

Its full title Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, Clara's Variations, Op. 20 (1853) was written as a present for her husband's forty-third birthday. True to form, the work begins with an unadorned statement of the theme, a lyrical one in F-sharp minor from his Bunte Blätter, followed by an elaborate series of treatments, some florid and others pensive. Upon hearing Tailleferre's music in 1917, Satie christened her his ‘musical daughter,' after which she and five other composers formed the collective known as ‘Les Six.' She's represented by Partita (1957), a distinguished three-part work comprising a haunting “Perpetuum Mobile,” suitably brooding “Notturno,” and sparkling “Allegramente.” American composer Zenobia Powell Perry, whose music was influenced by her African-American and Creek Indian heritage and the spirituals her grandfather sang to her as a child, follows with her stirring Rhapsody (1960).

With the jazzy rumination “Blue Air” and joyful “Brown Study” excerpted from 1963's Colour Suite (subtitled Five Rhythmic Studies for Piano), Dring brings refreshingly different tonalities to the release. Elena Kats-Chernin does something similar with Peggy's Rag (1996), a rousing piece dedicated to Australian composer Peggy-Glanville Hicks. It's wonderful and fitting that Monk's included, the crepuscular St. Petersburg Waltz (1997) characteristic of her idiosyncratic style. Mexico City-born Ortiz calls on Cahill's virtuosic command of the keyboard for Preludio y Estudio No. 3, its challenging “Prelude” movement in particular. At album's close, Wong begins She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees with an incantation of the song “Images” by Nina Simone, then couples its melody with arresting cascades and splashes of colour.

December 2022