Sarah Cahill: The Future is Female, Vol. 3, At Play
First Hand Records

At Play, the final volume in Sarah Cahill's The Future is Female trilogy, finishes the series on a thoroughly satisfying note. As before, the American pianist shows herself to be an inspired curator in the selection of female composers featured on the eighty-minute release. While some names are familiar (e.g., Pauline Oliveros), others are less so, with Cahill commendably bringing attention to underappreciated figures better known to music historians but not general listeners. Of the nine composers, five are living, the youngest Aida Shirazi, born in 1987. Like the preceding volumes, the third advances chronologically according to the date of a work's creation. That turns out to be an especially effective strategy when the recording culminates in a particularly strong piece by Regina Harris Baiocchi called Piano Poems (2020). Not only do the composers derive from different time periods, they also come from many parts of the world.

While Cahill conceived the project as a three-volume series, more instalments could be issued, given that The Future is Female comprises more than seventy compositions and less than half have appeared on the recordings. As she acknowledges, while the series is comprehensive, it's in no way exhaustive, presenting as it does a mere fraction of the material women composers have created. It's as striking in concert as on record. Live, she presents the project, initiated in 2018, as an encompassing marathon performance that can last anywhere from four to seven hours. In addition to the aforementioned composers, the volume presents works by Hélène de Montgeroult, Cecile Chaminade, Grazyna Bacewicz, Frangiz Ali-Zadeh, Chen Yi, Hannah Kendall, and Aida Shirazi. The stylistic terrain is varied and broad, but Cahill's performances are so engaged and committed, the force of her personality acts as a unifying ground.

Hélène de Montgeroult was not only a composer of merit, she was also the first Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire when it opened in 1795. Written in 1811, her Sonata No. 9, op. 5 no. 3 opens the volume with a dazzling three-part work rich in melodic expression and romantic feeling. The artful precision with which Cahill delivers the breezy “Allegro spiritoso” with its graceful trills and chiming patterns makes clear that the third volume will be special indeed. The delicate “Adagio non troppo” exudes a lyrical elegance characteristic of Bach, while the dynamic rhythmic thrust of the “Presto” ends the twenty-minute performance on a singing note. The romantic tone and harmonic allure of the opening selection carries over into Chaminade's stately Thème varié, Op. 98 (1898), after which the focus shifts from France to to Poland for Bacewicz's Scherzo (1934)—even if she followed attendance at the Warsaw Conservatory with a Paris stint studying with Nadia Boulanger. Bacewicz wrote her rollicking, neoclassicism-influenced Scherzo at the age of twenty-five soon after her tenure with Boulanger ended.

At this stage, the volume moves to living composers for the duration, Oliveros the exception. Yi's first with Guessing (1989), which takes a fragment from a popular Chinese folk song she heard as a child in China and approaches it from multiple rhythmic and expressive angles without losing the rustic essence of the tune. For her haunting Music for Piano (1989-1997), the Azerbaijan-born Ali-Zadeh has the pianist lay a glass-bead necklace along the instrument's strings to evoke the sound of the tar, a traditional Azerbaijani stringed instrument. The prickly timbres generated by the prepared piano distance Music for Piano from the volume's other works, as does the presence of a dark, rumbling undercurrent. Similar to Ali-Zadeh's piece, Albumblatt (2017) by the Tehran-born Shirazi works extended techniques into its performance, in this case a bass string scratched by the pianist with her fingernail, muting strings with fingers, and strumming strings with the hand. All such gestures deepen the moodiness of the piece and its evocative allure.

At Cahill's request, Oliveros wrote Quintuplets Play Pen (2001) to honour the 100th birthday of Ruth Crawford and remarked of its design that “the piece creates a kind of play pen for the ten fingers.” A mathematical dimension is present—there are ten distinct sections of ten measures apiece—but one notices it less than the polyrhythmic playfulness of its intricately woven dance. London-born Kendall fashioned her On the Chequer'd Field Array'd (2013) with chess in mind and specifically three sections, “Mindplay” laying the game's groundwork with complex moves and intense strategic planning, “Middlegame” suggesting through its oblique interlacing the dispersion of pieces about the chessboard, and “Coda” intimating pensive acceptance by one player of impending defeat. At Play ends with Piano Poems by the Chicago-based Baiocchi, her four-movement setting inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks' and Richard Wright's poetry. Instantly captivating are “common things surprise” and “cockleburs in wooly hair/tiny pond,” both of which charm with innocent, folk-like beauty; “beatitudes” entices with smooth-flowing lyricism, “a candle burns time” ruminative tenderness and an “I Loves You Porgy”-like echo.

May 2023