Pianist Cann plays (and talks about) underplayed music of black women composers

The Logan Center for the Arts celebrated some of the city’s neglected musical masters on Friday night, as pianist Michelle Cann served up a concert of music composed by women associated with Chicago’s black Renaissance, as part of the University of Chicago Presents series. The five women in question were Nora Holt, Betty Jackson King, Irene Britton Smith, Margaret Bonds, and (of course) Florence Price.
Although the program branded these composers as part of the same artistic movement, the pieces by them were written across a span of 52 years (from 1921 to 1973) and vary greatly in style. Holt’s is pure dance music, King’s is impressionistic, Smith’s is neo-Baroque, and Bonds’ is eclectic and virtuosic. (By now, Price’s style is hopefully familiar to many concertgoers and needs no description.)
One of Cann’s chief virtues as an interpreter was her evident comfort in each of these idioms. She was equally at home playing the shimmering arpeggios of King’s “Spring Intermezzo” (from Four Seasonal Sketches) and the bluesy riffs of Bonds’ “The Valley of the Bones” (from Spiritual Suite), the juba rhythms of Holt’s Negro Dance, and the straight classical figuration of Smith’s Variations on a Theme by MacDowell.
Cann also displayed a fine sense of pacing and an ability to make different lines sound completely independent. The former was especially important in Price’s two Fantasies nègres, which could sound episodic or shapeless in the wrong hands. Cann’s tempo flexibility allowed her to delineate an organic large-scale trajectory.
Cann’s linear independence helped her give a sharp rhythmic profile to the bass lines in some of the more ostinato-driven pieces—such as King’s “Autumn Dance” (again from Four Seasonal Sketches) and other portions of Bonds’ Spiritual Suite—while the melodies seemed to dance across the barlines, unshackled from strict meter.
One notable quirk that emerged over the course of the concert was Cann’s liberal pedaling. In unfamiliar music such as this, it is difficult to know how much of this was Cann’s choice. But although none of the pieces has a particularly dissonant harmonic vocabulary, Cann created many moments of tension by allowing notes to pile up over single depressions of the pedal, before releasing them.
Although not billed as such, the concert was effectively a lecture-recital, as Cann preceded each piece with an extensive biographical rundown of its composer. This included stories of why so little of Holt’s music survives, how King continued Holt’s legacy by becoming president of the National Association of Negro Musicians, how Smith struggled to juggle composing and teaching, and how Bonds was stifled by discrimination at Northwestern University. In a concert that ran nearly two hours, including the intermission, Cann played only around 50 minutes of music. This is about as much as many classical concerts pack into a half.
Additionally, Cann told personal stories of how this repertoire opened up to her at the time when she was asked to perform Price’s Piano Concerto. And she even prefaced Price’s Fantasie nègre No. 1 by singing “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass”—the spiritual it is based on.
It is understandable why Cann thought that these pieces require a lot of framing. The composers themselves are likely unknown to the audience, and telling their stories is vital for them in a way that isn’t necessarily the case for most other composers. Ultimately, however, one goes to a concert such as this to hear their music. Concertgoers can look up the composers’ biographies on their own time (including reading the program notes), but they have precious few opportunities to hear this music played professionally, live or even at all. The strength of these compositions and of Cann’s consummate playing of them makes one wish that there had been more.
Cann’s encore ended the evening on a wry note. She began by playing Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor as written. But then, partway through, she frowned, feigned a memory lapse, shrugged, and launched into a freewheeling, jazzier rearrangement (a transcription of the improvisation on the piece by Hazel Scott that Cann has played elsewhere) that concluded the night with bravado.
Musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play music of Mozart and Messiaen 3 p.m. February 3. chicagopresents.uchicago.edu
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