Sarah Cahill Partners Up

Bay Area pianist Sarah Cahill, legendary for her skillful introduction of new music to the world, headlined the first Faculty Recital Series of the year at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on Monday night. Though most of Cahill's performances are as a soloist, she loves to play with others and I've seen her perform with string quartets, solo violinists, orchestras, and other pianists. Last night was a two-piano extravaganza with Regina Myers, a longtime two-piano collaborator.

First up was the 1991 Three-Day Mix by Jamaican/British composer Eleanor Alberga. It was described in the program by the composer as a fun bit of music, nothing serious, but it turned out to be way more complex than that description, with intricately intertwined piano lines unknotting themselves into dance rhythms and then knotting up again in a different way.

Next up was Meredith Monk's Ellis Island, which was written for a 1982 short film she made, and in this context sounded like a meditative sorbet between 3-Day Mix and Errollyn Wallen's crazed 1990 The Girl in My Alphabet.

Written for four pianists on two pianos, the work begins with the most intense, gnarly disonnances possible and then somehow morphs into variations on The Girl from Ipanema while straddling strikingly different musical styles with elegant conviction. The pianists having a blast with the piece were Jerry Kuderna, Monica Chew, Regina Myers and Sarah Cahill.

Mr. Kuderna was a last-minute replacement for an ailing Allegra Chapman, and gave one of the great sight-reading performances imaginable. His partner, Monica Chew, was probably the real heroine of the performance as she traded places on the piano benches with Kundera depending on whether the treble or bass had the trickiest line at the moment. It was immense fun to watch and hear. Also on the program was Elena Kats-Chernin's Dance of the Paper Umbrellas, a lovely piece that used the two pianos in the most traditionally tuneful musical dialogue of the evening. The final piece was Riley Nicholson's 35-minute world premiere commission, Up, and I didn't stay for it because my stomach was rumbling. Stephen Smoliar enjoyed it, however, which you can read about here.