"The Future Is Female" albums by pianist
Sarah Cahill
mix contemporary music with works from the past and have offered a good deal of worthwhile little-known repertory. This
third volume
may be the best yet, taking the theme "At Play" and delivering delightful, humorous works.
Cahill
has set a goal of performing underexposed pieces, and here, she begins with the
Piano Sonata No. 9 in F sharp minor
of
Beethoven
's rough contemporary
Helene de Montgeroult
. It is a question of how playful this rather serious work is, but it hardly matters; of all the women composers who have received new attention over the last decades, she is among the most striking, and any recording of her work is welcome. The main body of the program brings many smiles. The "chequer'd field" of
Hannah Kendall
's
On the Chequer'd Field Arrayed
is none other than a chessboard. The pairing of
Grazyna Bacewicz
's early
Scherzo
with
Yi Chen
's similar-spirited
Guessing
is an inspired one.
Pauline Oliveros
'
Quintuplets Play Pen: Homage to Ruth Crawford Seeger
is notable as the composer's first conventionally notated work in some years, and
Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
Music for Piano
uses a prepared piano (prepared with a glass necklace) to evoke the sound of the tar stringed instrument from Azerbaijan. These are perhaps the highlights, but listeners may find their own, and there really isn't a disappointment in the bunch. Several of these works are world premieres.
achieves sympathetic performances of works in a great variety of idioms, and the single word that most listeners may apply to this collection is "fun." ~ James Manheim