SECULAR MUSIC CAME LATE TO RUSSIA. As far as most of us are concerned, it started with the operas of Glinka in the Romantic era, but Russian instrumental music was being produced a century earlier. True, much of the music making in Russia in the 1700s was handed over to imported Italian composers and virtuosi. A very few native sons, however, were elbowing through the Italian crowd, and one of the first to lead the pack was violinist Ivan Yevstafyevich Khandoshkin.

LEADING THE PACK: Anastasia Khitruk. Anastasia2.tif

Khandoshkin was born in a small Ukrainian village in 1747. By age 13, he was studying with Tito Porta and, as an apprentice in Tsar Peter III’s court orchestra, he was falling under the influence of two other Italians, co-concertmasters Domenico dall’Oglio and Pietro Peri.

Many details of Khandoshkin’s career, like many of his compositions, have been lost. He taught in a couple of music academies, and, in the early 1780s, he played in a St. Petersburg theater orchestra.

Khandoshkin seems to have spent the bulk of his career as the leading violinist-composer of the Imperial court, working at the pleasure of Catherine the Great, whose taste for Russian folk music made itself felt in some of Khandoshkin’s compositions. He made many arrangements of and variations on folk songs for two violins, or violin and viola.

Khandoshkin found such favor with the public and with Catherine that he retired with a rank just below that of hereditary nobility. Not bad for the grandson of a freed serf. Unfortunately, he died broke.

His pension didn’t keep up with Russia’s rapid inflation.

THE REAL DEAL

If you’re looking for Khandoshkin scores to try out, be careful; many publications under his name, including a viola concerto, are probably fakes by the 20th-century Ukrainian composer Mikhail Goldstein. But there’s no question of the authenticity of Khandoshkin’s most important works, the Opus 3 set of three solo violin sonatas. They were published sometime around his death in 1804 (though they possibly were written two decades earlier).

Each is a three-movement composition modeled on the solo sonatas of Bach, but incorporates many flashy effects and techniques Khandoshkin picked up from his Italian mentors.

Looking for daring leaps across strings? Bariolage? Sequences bristling with arpeggios? An encyclopedia of bow strokes? It’s all right here.

Today, the young Russian-trained, New York–based violinist Anastasia Khitruk specializes in music by neglected composers, so it didn’t take her long to discover the value of Khandoshkin’s solo sonatas. She has since recorded them, along with some of Khandoshkin’s folk-song arrangements, for the Naxos label.

Khitruk can tell from the scores what Khandoshkin’s own performance style must have been like—and it seems not to have resembled the modern school of Russian string playing.

“Russians have become known for a fiery, virtuosic, rough-edged style,” Khitruk says. “But Khandoshkin was a delicate player, with very fine bow control. You find him in the third and fourth positions on the E string, where it’s very difficult to jump across strings, but he does it.

“He goes far beyond the technical demands of [Tartini’s] Art of the Bow.

“Khandoshkin did not explore the upper positions much, except up on the G string, and I believe he had a great interest in the melancholy lower part of the violin, the fabulous singing part.

“Russians are supposed to be depressed, and he liked these sad songs that gave a melancholy cast to everything.”

While Khandoshkin’s sonatas look back to Bach and certain Italian performance models, Khitruk also finds that they look slightly ahead to the manner of Beethoven. “In the first movement of the third sonata,” she points out, “there’s a Beethovenesque passage where different material suddenly starts in the minor. And there are flashes of Beethovenesque dissonance in the first and third sonatas.”

Khandoshkin’s love of passing tritones and odd little dissonances, and his embrace of the fourths and fifths found so often in Russian song, according to Khitruk, require some nimble stretches and left-hand contractions that make many passages difficult to play cleanly.

“He had some unbelievable abilities,” she explains, but some of his music may have been made easier by using a customized bow.

“The modern bow is a little short for the length of the legatos he specifies,” says Khitruk, citing as an example the second variation in the third movement of Khandoshkin’s G-minor sonata.

“He may have used a redesigned bow. Khandoshkin had experience doing things like that. He became a violin dealer, and he once made a very fine violin out of an old coffin.

“I would kill to see one of those violins, but they do not seem to exist anywhere.”

She’s relieved, at least, to have Khandoshkin’s Opus 3 solo sonatas. “There are a lot of technically interesting things to be learned from them, and it’s better than Art of the Bow, which is very boring,” Khitruk says. “From Khandoshkin, you can get all the same difficulties from much more interesting music.”

FASHION FORWARD

Khitruk advocates playing the Opus 3 sonatas in a way that emphasizes their progressive elements, rather than dwelling on the requirements of 18th-century performance practice associated with Khandoshkin’s sources of inspiration.

The central fast movement of the first sonata, Khitruk says, “has almost a Beethovenian quality to it, in its tension and rhythmic drive. Baroque playing requires great sense of rhythmic freedom, but here this seems not appropriate. It was written to have a very strong pulse.”

Khandoshkin tended not to sully his scores with keyboard accompaniment, but Khitruk warns against underestimating the influence of the keyboard in Khandoshkin’s solo-violin sonata writing. “There’s sometimes a feeling of pedal point,” she says. “And in the second sonata’s last movement there’s a repeating figure of 16th notes with an accompaniment of eighth notes. That’s a very polyphonic and essentially keyboard device, playing an accompaniment to the melody.”

Khitruk believes that grappling with Khandoshkin will help you come to grips with more standard repertoire, in a musically interesting way.

“It really is educational,” she says. “It has many things you won’t find in Bach or Tartini. It’s got some unusual bow-control issues, which help you a lot when you go back to your Mozart or your Vieuxtemps—it works on that light, very fine control you need to have a comfortable son filé. Once some violinists start bouncing, they don’t try to refine the bounce.

“In these pieces, you cannot crunch; you cannot under any circumstances have anything but beautiful sound quality. On the other hand, you have unusual left-hand positions that create tension, so you need to have a free bow arm to compensate for the tension in the left hand.

“Khandoshkin’s music is not so great that it takes your breath away, but it is extremely pleasant, quite Romantic, very Russian sounding. It is not such music that you feel intimidated that unless you get it absolutely perfect you feel you’re committing a sin against God, like in Bach.”