Episode 15 - May 17, 2021
This episode is also available in a video version on YouTube.
The music of Nikolai Medtner is often forgotten in the shadow of his colleague and friend, Sergei Rachmaninoff. Pianist Cahill Smith joins us to talk about his love for the music of this early 20th-century composer.
You can hear Cahill Smith and other NOVA artists on our next concert, available beginning Friday, May 21, at https://www.novaslc.org/concerts/2021/5/21/spring21concert3.
Anne Francis Bayless | host
Cahill Smith | pianist
produced by Chris Myers (argylearts.com)
Copyright © 2021 NOVA Chamber Music Series. All rights reserved.
Transcript
Narrator
Welcome to the NOVA Podcast. On today’s episode, NOVA artistic co-director Anne Francis Bayless interviews pianist Cahill Smith.
Anne Francis Bayless
Well, it is really my great pleasure to be speaking with Cahill Smith. And Cahill has been here in Logan for a year now, a year plus. We’re going into your second year on the faculty here at Utah State University. Just speaking personally for a moment, I was on the search committee that hired you...
Cahill Smith
Thank you
Anne Francis Bayless
I just have to say it was amazing to get to meet you and to see somebody who is really working at such an incredibly high level in all ways in the profession: as a performer, and as a teacher, and as a researcher. So we’re so thrilled that you’re here, and I’m especially thrilled to be here in my capacity as one of the music directors for the NOVA Chamber Music Series to virtually introduce you to our audience.
Now, in September, you would have been performing on the stage of Libby Gardner Concert Hall with the Fry Street Quartet in Shostakovich— our Shostakovich Quintet project, which will rise again, I hope someday. But we were also going to hear some Medtner on that program. And thankfully, we still do get to hear some Medtner. And Medtner’s kind of a hero to you and somebody who you’re really… you’ve made your life’s work in studying him and his music. So if you wouldn’t mind, just tell us a little about Medtner and why you were drawn to his music.
Cahill Smith
Absolutely, but first, thanks again for asking me on the series. I was so looking forward to Shostakovich and meeting your audience, too. So I haven’t played a concert in Salt Lake City so far, so I’m looking forward to…
Anne Francis Bayless
Soon. Soon.
Cahill Smith
...meeting this great audience someday. But thanks again for having me and for taking the time.
Yeah, Medtner is… I think, for me, just one of the most captivating composers that seems to be less heard than others. I don’t know how to say that quickly. The quality of his music and how it speaks to me doesn’t seem to match up with how well he is known or not known. And so his music is very special to me personally, and I think it’s starting on a kind of upward trend, at least among pianists, to be more popular in the concert repertoire. And then in academia, as well, he’s better taught and appreciated in the general piano audience.
And he’s a little bit like Chopin, in that he didn’t write a piece that excludes the piano. So it’s all piano music or with piano. He was tied to the instrument as a composer’s tool, and he was a fantastic virtuoso, of course, so I think that’s part of the reason, maybe, that he’s not known outside of piano circles. but nowadays, I think it’s pretty common to see his music in international piano competitions and especially, there’s a maybe larger following in Russia and England, where he immigrated and spent the rest of his life. So I don’t want to sit here and drone on forever about him. i don’t know what it is that you’re interested in hearing about…
Anne Francis Bayless
Well, maybe just a little bit about the pieces you chose to play today.
Cahill Smith
Sure. Absolutely. So for people who don’t know him, in general, I like to think of him as a cousin or best friend of Rachmaninoff. And the latter is actually true. They were great friends through their entire lives and relied on each other for artistic advice and just sharing music. Their wives were good friends, as well. And so 1880 to 1951. And I guess the common criticism of Medtner is that his music is old-fashioned. That he was content to stay with the harmonic vocabulary of Brahms, maybe… Brahms plus, I’ll say… All the way until the 1950s. So writing this traditional tonal music in a lot of traditional forms, but trying to say something new with them.
And I think for that reason, he was maybe skipped over in his time period. He admitted himself that he felt he was an anachronism. That his music didn’t belong in that time period, and he was born a century too late, is how he said it. Because he was fascinated with Beethoven and with sonata form, really. He’s the most prolific composer of sonatas after Beethoven for the piano. He has fourteen piano sonatas, and they’re pretty big substantial works, too. So I didn’t record any of those, because they’re heavy-handed and long to listen to.
So what I presented today is just four little short character pieces that I really love and enjoy playing and learning. And also because they’re a challenge for me. Every single one of those pieces has something about it that was kind of a new technique or new struggle to get through. And I think all his pieces are like that. It’s very similar to Brahms in that every piece is quite different and develops out of its own self-contained logic, so there’s always something to do and always something that throws you for a loop in a performance.
So those pieces, the first one that I’m playing is his first published piece. It’s from Eight Mood Pictures, Opus 1. I think he wrote this when he was about 16 years old, so he was a school student. The second piece is from Opus 38. It’s from a book of “Forgotten Melodies”. Not forgotten because it’s Medtner and we all forgot him, but that’s the actual title of the book. And the second and third one are from the second book of Forgotten Melodies. So he made a few collections of those.
And, just to give a few notes about the pieces themselves, the first one, his first published piece, It has a kind of mysterious story behind it that he claims is true, but I don’t know that anyone has ever followed up. And he wrote this piece early in his life and then later, around Opus 36, went back and noticed that the poem which inspired him to write the piece, and he has a little motto from the poem that’s by Lermontov at the top of the score. He went to match each of the melody notes, which you’ll hear played by the thumbs, with the syllables in the text and found that it just mysteriously matched the poem perfectly. And he decided to reset it as a song, so he just transposed it to another key that was more comfortable for the singer and published it again with the words.
So I’m playing the solo version, obviously, without a singer. So polyrhythmic challenge, I was showing you before, with this very strange and complicated, for a first piece, I think it’s just amazing that mastery of rhythm and harmony there, and ends up sounding like just a beautiful duet for the thumbs. And it feels uncomfortable to play, but in the end, when you listen, it sounds very smooth and very beautiful with all of these rhythms put together.
The second piece is called Canzona serenata, or the Night Song. This has a little quotation from another sonata in that set. His idea with that set was to give a big piano sonata and then a lot of little character pieces afterwards. Sort of play on the themes from the sonata. And the last piece is like a coda to the sonata, trying to create this large concert experience for everyone. And so this piece I just love. It’s a beautiful melody and starts out with this motto. And it ends with the same mysterious motto very very softly with some thumb notes sustained over the barline at the end. That’s actually supposed to go on to another piece that I didn’t play. Because I love this melody and I wanted to share that one.
The third one is a totally different atmosphere. It’s called Meditation, and this one I like to think of as a nightmare. [laughs] Something twisted and almost… it’s hard, in music, we get all these emotions, but I’ve never felt the emotion of disgust in music, and I think that this piece really brings that out in some way. It’s like some horrible nightmare where you see something and you just become obsessed with this idea and you can’t get it out of your head. So a very bizarre piece, but still traditionally tonal, in some ways. And he avoids kind of any resolution until the very last note. There are no cadences and no tonic triads. Interesting piece that way. That starts the second book of Forgotten Melodies. And the last one I played is called Primavera— Springtime. It’s just a lovely little melody, almost pentatonic all the way through. And I always like to think of that one as a celebration for someone living in Russia, where getting through the winter is a matter of life and death, which is different from where I grew up in Alabama, it’s no big deal. So that’s an outpouring of joy, I think, and it’s four pieces.
Anne Francis Bayless
I know I for one am looking forward to getting to know his music much more in depth with you here with us. Cahill is of course already mentioned to us more than once that there’s a piano quintet.
Cahill Smith
Yeah, Sorry.
Anne Francis Bayless
No! We’re pretty excited about getting to know that. But I’m sure the NOVA audience, too, will be really excited to kind of get inside his language. So thank you for that. It’s really very useful. And now you mentioned your upbringing in Alabama. So you don’t have to give us your full bio here, but just tell us quickly a little bit about your background and how you made it here to Utah State.
Cahill Smith
Yeah, that is a very...
Anne Francis Bayless
Circuitous...
Cahill Smith
...circuitous path. And sometimes I still wake up here and look at the mountains. How did I end up here? Is this right? Is this home now? And Heather and I are still dealing with that when we go hiking. You know, just beautiful nature that you guys have here. It still feels like sort of a honeymoon phase for us to see these beautiful outdoors here.
So yeah. Grew up in the middle of nowhere in Alabama. A little town called Tallassee. And I started, I feel… I always regretted not starting earlier, but asked for lessons back in elementary school. I think I was finishing third grade. People always ask the first time I wanted to play piano, I think it was then. Our school put together a kind of musical theater thing for third graders. It’s called the third grade opera. And I was assigned to be a performer, like an actor, and a composer, and I didn’t know anything about either of those. But we sat in the room with, now I realize, a very talented third grade teacher with amazing musicianship who would come up with these songs with us. She was transposing at the keyboard, coming up with lyrics, and I was just fascinated watching here get around that. It was inspiring.
So I asked if I could have lessons then. And moved on to a really wonderful teacher in Alabama who really changed my palette, I guess, for music I listened to. Because I just grew up mostly with country and bluegrass. And that's still a big part of my— I won’t call it wasted space, but— lots of country lyrics stuck up there. Anyways. When I first was introduced to classical music, just fell in love with it. Was so excited about it. Interested in the sounds. Just hadn’t been exposed to it as a kid. I started about fifteen, to just listen to the things obsessively with my teacher, and that really helped me to get going. And I think that sort of sparked the interest.
And went to college in Alabama to study with a Van Cliburn silver medalist there, Jakov Kasman. He really helped to push me, I think, through that time period. And moved to your home, Michigan, for a couple of years and did some school there with Arthur Green at the University of Michigan. Moved to New York, upstate New York, another freezing cold place in Rochester, for a DMA. And then before I moved to Utah, I was teaching at a liberal arts school in Tennessee called Lee University. Small school there with a wonderful music program and some really incredible pianists.
Anne Francis Bayless
Yes
Cahill Smith
I was really lucky to land there, and I was able to have so many great musical experiences there. Not only with my colleagues but with the students, as well. I think that really helped me to develop a taste for teaching and to just really love doing that. And so now I’m here doing the same thing. And I think the first time I heard about Utah State was from a friend of mine who lives down in Ogden, and he mentioned that there’s this really wonderful institution here looking for a piano teacher. And so I applied, and I came up to visit and met you guys for the first time. I think it was February. And now I’m here.
Anne Francis Bayless
Yeah, you’re a Utahn.
Cahill Smith
I guess so. I have a driver license now.
Anne Francis Bayless
You’re official! Well, you mentioned hiking. So of course, you have certainly availed yourself of some of the incredible beauty that surrounds you. That’s something that’s so enticing for so many of us, and of course living here. Well, I happen to know on good authority, too, that you know quite a lot about the cello and piano repertoire. And maybe you could just share with our NOVA audience why that is that you know that repertoire as well as you do.
Cahill Smith
I feel pretty ashamed about my string repertoire knowledge. You know all of the piano music, which is awesome. Are you a pianist? Do you play as well?
Anne Francis Bayless
Not very well.
Cahill Smith
Your husband, though. Brant?
Anne Francis Bayless
Yes.
Cahill Smith
That’s also a joy of marriage. My wife is a cellist, and so of course I have a very soft spot for the cello. Who doesn’t? It’s an amazing instrument. It just cuts to your core with the vocal quality of it. So yeah, my wife is Heather, and she plays cello beautifully, and we’ve enjoyed playing a lot of music together. And she is now transitioning a little bit to a different career, but I’m still trying to get her to play as much as she can, because I love the repertoire so much. It’s so beautiful.
Anne Francis Bayless
That’s so great. Well, you referenced her changing careers. Heather is actually, for those Salt Lakers, she is of course just starting medical school at the University of Utah. So I hope we’ll see her when she can come to some of these Sunday afternoon concerts at NOVA. And selfishly, of course, now, as a cellist, I know that this means that maybe I’ll be able to get some real estate— some time with you more easily. Because she is otherwise occupied. Well, Cahill, it’s really been a pleasure. Thank you for sharing a little bit about yourself, and especially about the music. It’s delightful, and we’re just so thrilled to have you as part of the NOVA family going forward, and of course, we can’t wait to have you there in person sooner rather than later, I hope.
Cahill Smith
That’s so sweet. I can’t wait to meet the audience but also just to go and listen. Now more than ever, we were just talking before we started how important it is to listen to music live and to feel that connection. I’m so excited to go down there and to listen, too, to be an audience member. That’s my favorite. So yes. Thank you. Thanks for having me and thanks for giving Medtner a little spot.
Anne Francis Bayless
Absolutely. Absolutely. No, glad to have a platform for it.
Cahill Smith
And I’ll say to your audience, if you have time for a second listening, for me, this music is similar to Brahms and some other composers, that the second time it kind of opens up and really richly pays back the time for a second listening in a different way. Thanks for having me and for including the music.
Anne Francis Bayless
Absolutely. And I guess we can say that’s one of the many silver linings of our pandemic situation is that if this is in fact released online then people can listen again. It’s very easy.
Cahill Smith
If they do!
Anne Francis Bayless
Now, now. It’s not the live experience, but we get the benefit of that. To get to listen again and maybe again, to get to know it. So thank you, Cahill..
Cahill Smith
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Anne Francis Bayless
Our pleasure.
Narrator
Today’s episode was hosted by Anne Francis Bayless. You can hear Cahill Smith perform music by Medtner on the next concert in NOVA’s season, available beginning Friday, May 21, at novaslc.org.
NOVA has received generous support from the Utah Legislature & Utah Division of Arts and Museums, Lawrence T. and Janet T. Dee Foundation, Salt Lake County Zoo Arts & Parks, George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, iZotope, Salt Lake City Arts Council, Cultural Vision Fund, Dominion Energy, Rocky Mountain Power Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
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