Kashperova: Piano Concerto in A minor

Stravinsky, of all people, sat at her feet twice a week and apparently never thought to ask what she did with the rest of her time. That silence tells you most of what you need to know about the fate of Leokadiya Kashperova, and about how history keeps its books.

She was, by every surviving account, a formidable pianist — a student of Anton Rubinstein no less, which ought to count for something in a culture that fetishizes pedigree. That she vanishes almost entirely from the record after a disastrous marriage in 1916 is the old story, told so many times now that it risks its own kind of numbness. But the music on this disc refuses to be filed under sociology. It wants to be heard on its own terms, as music, full stop — and mostly it earns that hearing.

The Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 2, comes from 1900, written while she was still drilling scales into the young Igor. Oliver Triendl plays it with a mastery that never calls attention to itself, which is exactly right, because this is a score that wants a certain unforced grandeur rather than circus pyrotechnics. The opening Allegro maestoso struts in with trombones doing their best impression of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 — that same faintly pompous fanfare-gesture — before the soloist muscles in with real virtuosity. There’s a second theme with an unmistakably Russian tang to it, modal inflections that owe something to Balakirev’s harmonic world filtered through a Moscow Conservatory polish. The cadenza sprawls, indulgently, the way cadenzas did before anyone worried about proportion. And then — this is the interesting choice — the movement doesn’t blaze out but thinks its way to a close. Unusual. Smart, actually.

The slow movement breathes. Triendl and Anna Skryleva let it breathe, too, which is not nothing; there’s a real temptation in this repertoire to over-plush everything, to smear vibrato and rubato across music that needs a lighter touch to reveal its bones. Here the central climax does open into gorgeously upholstered orchestration, strings thickening into something almost Rachmaninovian, but the movement never loses its shape.

It’s the finale that stays with you. Allegro con anima, built on a polonaise’s dotted swagger, syncopated and a little sly. Kashperova saves her best tune for a hymn-like broadening near the close — the kind of gesture Rachmaninov himself leaned on constantly, that trick of taking an earlier idea and letting it swell into something quasi-devotional before the final sprint. It works. I won’t pretend it’s more than a very good, densely upholstered late-Romantic concerto — nobody is going to mistake it for the Rachmaninov Second — but it deserves better than the total obscurity it has had for a century and a quarter.

The Symphony in B minor, op. 4, dates from 1905 and is, frankly, the stronger piece — more confident in its handling of large paragraphs, less reliant on virtuoso decoration to keep momentum going. The dedication to Glazunov is telling. You can hear her listening hard to The Seasons, to Glazunov’s easy fluency with orchestral color and his habit of letting a movement unfold organically rather than through blunt contrast. There’s real structural intelligence in how the first movement’s material returns transformed rather than merely repeated — this is somebody who understood Brahmsian developing variation, not just Tchaikovskian sequence-building. The scoring throughout is confident: winds get real solo material, not just doubling, and the brass — when Skryleva lets them properly off the leash — has genuine weight without becoming Wagnerian bombast.

Skryleva conducts the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin with evident conviction, and the orchestra plays as if it believes in the music, which matters more than people admit. There’s no condescension here, no sense of musicians humoring a curiosity. Ensemble in the strings is tidy, the woodwind solos are characterful without mannerism, and the recorded sound — made in the Haus des Rundfunks, a hall with a warm, slightly reverberant bloom — flatters both the concerto’s plush orchestration and the symphony’s more granular argument.

Do I think Kashperova belongs on the shelf next to Glazunov or Rachmaninov, her obvious models? No — not quite, not yet, on this evidence alone. But she belongs somewhere well above the footnote she’s occupied for a hundred years, and this disc, whatever its ultimate verdict on her stature, makes an unanswerable case that she deserved a career, deserved an audience, deserved better than a piano studio’s worth of anonymous labor teaching someone else’s genius. Capriccio and these superb performers have done her a real service. Now it’s up to the rest of us to listen.