Leokadiya Kashperova

Piano Symphony in B minor

The Symphony in B minor of 1905 is Kashperova’s grandest composition, revisited by her in 1909 in order to transform the orchestral original into a large-scale concert work for solo piano. She may well have been prompted in this direction by Balakirev with whom she worked in close collaboration during the last two years of his life: in 1908 she gave the premiere of Balakirev’s Second Piano Sonata, and in 1909 she gave the first performance of his Second Symphony in the composer’s four-hand piano transcription alongside conductor/pianist Sergei Lyapunov. No record of a public performance of the Piano Symphony has been uncovered to date but Kashperova surely presented the work privately at her regular musical soirées in her St Petersburg apartment. The publication of the Piano Symphony as part of Dr Graham Griffiths’s Kashperova Edition is a major rediscovery of a work which can now take its place alongside the symphonic solo keyboard works of Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Alkan.