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Purchase Cahill’s debut album here – Medtner: Forgotten Melodies

Artist Signed Cover

Selected as Classical Radio Boston’s (WCRB) “CD of the Week”

Read the full review here!

“Smith is careful to reveal bits of the DNA of all the pieces on the recording while keeping the emphasis on the sheer beauty of their character. His liner notes offer small excerpts of the scores, unveiling motifs and themes with eloquent descriptions of their effect.”

“The “Canzona Matinata” (track 12) hovers in the air with a floating and irresistible lyricism in Smith’s hands, and throughout the recording there is a palpable sense of love – a real affinity for the directness and honesty in Medtner’s music, which goes straight to the heart.”

In his debut album, pianist Cahill Smith illuminates the solo piano music of romantic Russian composer Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951), the lesser-known giant whom Rachmaninoff named “the greatest composer of our time.” The Forgotten Melodies are overflowing with drama, lyricism, childlike imagination, and a web of thematic connections that can elicit a sort of musical déjà vu for the listener, sounding at once both ancient and new, both completely strange and intimately familiar.

Reviews of Forgotten Melodies in Concert:

“Mr. Smith was in his element, revealing every twist and turn, every poignant repeat of the cyclic themes, with beautiful shimmering colors I haven’t heard since Gilels played the Sonata reminiscenza in Carnegie Hall in 1980.” (New York Concert Review, in a review of his 2015 recital at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall)

“…unexpected gems” “…in Mr. Smith’s hands they were absolutely endearing.” (East Hampton Star)

Cahill completed his Doctorate of Musical Arts at the Eastman School of Music, his Master’s degree at the University of Michigan, and his Bachelor’s at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He currently serves on the faculty of Lee University.