Oct. 31: Pianist Sarah Cahill Presented by The Mansion at Strathmore in Phantom – An Evening of Dramatic and Haunting Music Fit for Halloween
Pianist Sarah Cahill Performs Phantom
Presented by Strathmore
A Dramatic and Haunting Concert featuring Music by
Deirdre Gribbin, Frederic Rzewski, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Henry Cowell, Aida Shirazi, Amy Beach, Samuel Adams,
and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Thursday, October 31, 2024 at 7:30pm
The Mansion at Strathmore | 10701 Rockville Pike | North Bethesda, MD
Tickets and More Information
“Pianist Sarah Cahill commands a near-godlike status among fans of contemporary classical music” – NPR Music
Sarah Cahill: www.sarahcahill.com
North Bethesda, MD – On Thursday, October 31, 2024 at 7:30pm pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, will perform at The Mansion at Strathmore (10701 Rockville Pike). For this concert, Sarah Cahill gives a performance befitting Halloween. Cahill will perform a wide array of stylistically diverse works in a program she has titled Phantom.
The concert will feature performances of: Unseen by Deirdre Gribbin; Forest Scenes by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; Humanitas by Frederic Rzewski; April Preludes by Vítězslava Kaprálová; The Banshee by Henry Cowell; Albumblatt by Aida Shirazi The Mysterious Forest by Erkki Melartin; and Shade Studies by Samuel Adams.
Phantom presents uncanny and spectral works centered around Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s remarkable and rarely-played Forest Scenes, which depicts a romantic encounter between a forest maiden and a phantom. Frederic Rzewski composed his extraordinary Humanitas for Sarah in 2020, which includes texts written by Catullus, Plautus, and other Classical poets, as well as texts by radical feminist writer Audre Lourde selected by Sarah. Finnish composer Erkki Melartin's The Mysterious Forest, in six short movements, immerses us in an atmosphere of witches, trolls, and supernatural beings.
Henry Cowell’s The Banshee is his musical interpretation of the Gaelic folktale. According to Cowell, “A Banshee is a fairy woman who comes at the time of a death to take the soul back into the Inner World.” Cowell evokes the Banshee’s legendary wail by instructing the performer to manipulate the inner strings of piano. Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Aida Shirazi is a founding member of the Iranian Female Composers Association. Her piece Albumblatt uses a number of techniques inside the piano, like strumming and plucking the strings, finger muting, and creating harmonics on the nodes of the strings.
In his program note, Samuel Adams says of Shade Studies: “I wrote Shade Studies in the fall of 2014 as part of Sarah Cahill's commissioning project in honor of minimalist pioneer Terry Riley's 80th birthday. The work examines the counterpoint between the acoustic resonance of the piano and sine waves. The music rests in a very narrow dynamic field and is built of cadences, silences, and repeated gestures. As the work unfolds, the two resonance systems engage through masking and illumination, creating a brief exploration of musical ‘shade’.”
Vítězslava Kaprálová was one of the most brilliant young Czech composers to emerge between the two world wars. Before her death at age 25, she composed prolifically, and was the first woman to conduct the Czech Philharmonic. Her April Preludes were composed for the pianist Rudolph Firkusny. Born in Belfast and now living in London, Deirdre Gribbin describes her work Unseen as an homage to lives lost in the Grenfell Tower fire as well as large numbers of unhoused people in London. She composed the piece in 2017.
Cahill says of the music on this program and performing at The Mansion at Strathmore:
“It's such a great pleasure to be returning to the gorgeous Mansion at Strathmore. Many of us love Halloween but are too old for trick or treating, so this is a way to gather together to celebrate our connection to the supernatural world and how composers have conjured up spirits and phantoms.”
About Sarah Cahill: Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF).
Cahill’s latest project is The Future is Female, an investigation and reframing of the piano literature featuring more than seventy compositions by women around the globe, from the Baroque to the present day, including new commissioned works. Recent and upcoming performances of The Future is Female include concerts at The Barbican, Carolina Performing Arts, National Gallery of Art, Carlsbad Music Festival, Detroit Institute of Arts, University of Iowa, Bowling Green New Music Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, North Dakota Museum of Art, Mayville State University, the EXTENSITY Concert Series’ Women Now Festival in New York, and the Newport Classical Music Festival. Cahill also performed music from The Future is Female for NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert series.
Sarah Cahill’s discography includes more than twenty albums on the New Albion, CRI, New World, Tzadik, Albany, Innova, Cold Blue, Other Minds, Irritable Hedgehog, and Pinna labels. Her three-album series, The Future is Female, was released on First Hand Records between March 2022 and April 2023. These albums encompass 30 compositions by women from around the globe, from the 17th century to the present day, and include many world premiere recordings.
Cahill’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and is a regular pre-concert speaker with the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
For more information, visit www.sarahcahill.com.
For Calendar Editors:
Description: Pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, is presented by Strathmore Mansion in Phantom. Cahill will perform an extensive program of melodically dramatic music, featuring an array of uncanny and spectral works centered around Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s remarkable and rarely-played Forest Scenes.
Concert details:
Who: Pianist Sarah Cahill
Presented by Strathmore
What: Music by Deirdre Gribbin, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Frederic Rzewski, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Henry Cowell, Aida Shirazi, Erkki Melartin, and Samuel Adams
When: Thursday, October 31, 2024 at 7:30pm
Where: The Mansion at Strathmore, 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda, MD 20852
Tickets and information: www.strathmore.org/events-tickets/what-s-on-in-the-mansion/sarah-cahill/