Cello Concerto (1940)

SKU: HL.48025018

ISBN 9781784544324.

Leokadiya Kashperova (1872-1940), hitherto consigned to a footnote in musical history as Stravinsky's piano teacher, is undergoing rediscovery. A double graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, she emerged as a virtuoso pianist and composer in the romantic tradition. She was associated with some of the great musicians of her day, including Mily Alexayevich Balakirev and Leopold von Auer. She performed in both Germany and the UK in the 1900s, but her career petered out after 1920. These new editions of the Cello Sonatas 1 & 2 have been broadcast and recorded, whilst new editions of her Symphony and hitherto unpublished Piano Concerto have recently been issued.

SKU: HL.49029337

ISBN 9790220127939.

SKU: HL.48025440

ISBN 9781784549060. UPC: 196288216391.

Leokadiya Kashperova (1872–1940), hitherto consigned to a footnote in musical history as Stravinsky's piano teacher, is undergoing rediscovery. A double graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, she emerged as a virtuoso pianist and composer in the romantic tradition. She was associated with some of the great musicians of her day, including Balakirev and Auer. She performed in both Germany and the UK in the 1900s, but her career petered out after 1920. The Piano Concerto (1900) is Kashperova's earliest surviving orchestral work, and it was premiered by the composer the following year in Moscow and St Petersburg, bringing her much wider recognition and paving the way for an international career. Cast in three movements and in a Romantic idiom, pianistic virtuosity is often channelled into the pianist's left hand, which is required to negotiate widely-spaced 'extreme' arpeggios – awkwardly angular when adagio, fiendishly technical when molto allegro. Kashperova's orchestral colours are achieved by felicitous solos for the woodwind, horns and brass. Noteworthy, too, are unexpected glimpses of chamber music when, in the last movement for example, the piano combines fleetingly with solo violin and solo cello in passages. The concerto's quick music (Molto allegro and Allegro con anima) admirably portrays the vivacious personality of their composer, described in 1906 as offering those around her 'an abundance of joy, excitement and fun'. The central movement, by contrast, is a tender Adagio which offers the listener a gem of musical poetry.

SKU: HL.14010774

Trio (Op. 10) was composed c.1940 and first published in 1943. It is scored for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano. One of Frankel's earliest works, it is light and pleasing, showing how the composer was first influenced by jazz and classical chamber music before he later turned to larger symphonic works and started experimenting with serialism.

Benjamin Frankel (1906-1973) was a British composer and musician. He is best remembered for writing over one hundred film and television scores, including The Man In The White Suit and The Battle Of The Bulge, but he also wrote eight symphonies and many smaller works such as his ViolinSonata and Concerto, which were written for Max Rostal.