Fanfare
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A Danish piano and cello couple present music from a largely forgotten Russian woman composer

KASHPEROVA Cello Sonatas No. 1 in G; No. 2 in E minor, Op. 1  Janne Fredens (vc), Søren Rastogi (pn)  OUR RECORDINGS 8.226946 (62:33)

“We have … become increasingly interested in what happens when performers approach unfamiliar music with the same confidence we normally bring to a Beethoven or Brahms score,” said pianist Søren Rastogi and his wife, cellist Janne Fredens, when I interviewed them for this issue. “If you begin with the assumption that every bar deserves to make musical sense, you immediately enter a much more curious and investigative artistic process instead of simply ‘playing the notes.’”

This new OUR Recordings CD, entitled Resurgence, contains the two Op. 1 cello sonatas by Russian composer Leokadiya Kashperova (1872-1940). Their previous joint recital, also on OUR Recordings, was called Upheaval to indicate it consisted of music composed just before or during World War I. It included works by four other women composers: Henriëtte Bosmans (1895-1952); Dora Pejačević (1885–1923); Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979); and her tragically short-lived sister Lili (1893-1918).

Given that the liner notes to Upheaval also mentioned that Rastogi had participated in a multi-media presentation on Clara Schumann (1819-1896), I asked him and Fredens if they had a particular interest in music by women composers. “We are interested more broadly in excellent music that, for one reason or another, has fallen outside the standard repertoire,” they replied. “Women composers are particularly interesting in this respect because so many historical factors worked against them, both during their lifetimes and afterwards.”

Leokadiya Kashperova’s name has lingered in the history of classical music because she was one of Igor Stravinsky’s piano teachers. He mentioned her in his French-language 1935 autobiography Chronicle of My Life but reportedly called her “antiquated and a blockhead.” She taught at the Smolny girls’ school in St. Petersburg but had the bad luck to get that job in 1916, a year before the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks took over the Smolny as headquarters for their cause, and even though Kashperova’s husband was one of the Bolshevik leaders, Sergei Andropov, they fled St. Petersburg and settled in Moscow, where she gave her final piano recital in 1920. She lived two more decades after that, but was largely forgotten as both pianist and composer.

The process of bringing Kashperova’s legacy back to life began about 25 years ago and was spearheaded by Dr. Graham Griffiths, editor of the Kashperova Edition at the Boosey and Hawkes music publishing firm in Britain. Griffiths explains in the program notes to this CD that “these moments of discovery were so extraordinary it felt as if they were being directed. For example, the discovery of Kashperova’s Symphony, lost for over a century, within minutes of my first arrival in Russia; the coincidence that her home region (Yaroslavl) is twinned with mine (Exeter).”

Kashperova first published these two sonatas in 1895 and 1896. She wrote them for herself and her performing partner, cellist Alexander Verzhbilovich. Kashperova wasn’t a composer at the level of Henriëtte Bosmans or Lili Boulanger from Upheaval, but the works here, though not masterpieces, are tough, well constructed pieces, unmistakably Russian. If I’d heard them “blind” I’d probably have guessed Rachmaninoff as the composer, even though Kashperova didn’t have Rachmaninoff’s gift for memorable Big Tunes.
Fredens and Rastogi really throw themselves into this music big-time, following through on their stated desire to play these virtually unknown scores as if they were acknowledged masterpieces by Beethoven or Brahms. They are completely on top of this music technically, and OUR Recordings gives them a luminous sonority that does full justice both to Kashperova’s scores and the fervent way Fredens and Rastogi play them. Recommended. Mark Gabrish Conlan