Sasha Kasman Laude: Self-revelation supercharges performance in APA Premiere Series

Sasha Kasman Laude performed with distinction.

More than most young pianists vying for distinction along the competition path, Sasha Kasman Laude seems more explicit about juxtaposing her creative and interpretive sides.

This was evident Sunday afternoon when the 29-year-old pianist, now on the faculty of Utah State University, showed her claim to coming out on top of the 2025 American Piano Awards.

She made excerpted and even arranged scores ask to be accepted as core repertoire.  Her advocacy of Nicolai Medtner, which she traced  to a recital she gave at the age of 13, is no longer so much of an outlier as it must have appeared then. APA events have recently made that Russian composer more familiar here.

Setting Joseph Haydn and Sergei Rachmaninoff side by side in the same recital was certainly arresting. And if, to launch a recital,  honoring J.S. Bach on the piano has long been conventional, her choice of an arrangement of the Largo from an organ sonata, followed by a Bach-related composition through a jazz pianist's filter, commanded special attention.

I found the unusual gathering of solo pieces a bracing indication of Kasman Laude's individuality. After intermission, her performance of the Robert Schumann concerto placed her fully in the arena of conventional repertoire. The way she played the familiar piece, however, linked fruitfully to what had charmed the Indiana History Center audience in the program's first half.

Altogether, Kasman Laude's charisma (a word often loosely applied but quite fitting here) was grounded in repertoire choices that immediately thrust her to the forefront of the current competition's finalists. (Three more of them will be heard in the Premiere Series format over the next few months.) She didn't shy away from expressing her personality; fortunately, that didn't involve any obvious eccentricities.

In two movements linked without pause, Haydn's Sonata in G major was suffused with the composer's characteristic wit. The question-and-answer structure of the Allegro innocente first movement was fully elucidated. The Presto effervescence of the second got confirmation in a later idiom with Rachmaninoff's E minor Prelude (Op. 32, No. 4). Its rhetorical pauses set up a galloping zest at the climax, yielding to a gracefully subdued coda. The reflective pace of the G major Prelude (No. 5) from the same set had a haunting accompaniment pattern, emphasized in a way that oddly foreshadowed Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." 

She balanced exquisitely the contrasting parallel voices of the Bach (arranged by Samuil Feinberg), then seemed to revel in the interval leaps and hints of jazz in Brad Mehldau's "After Bach." Leading up to intermission, she juxtaposed contrasting Medtner pieces, "March of the Paladin" and "Canzona fluviata," a selection that showed off her rhythmic and lyrical gifts in succession. 

After friendly, informative remarks to the audience, she capped the Medtner episode with her own arrangement of a Medtner song, "Winter Evening." The elaborate piano part makes it indeed a good candidate for solo keyboard adaptation. Medtner's near-contemporary and friend in their Russian youth, Rachmaninoff, composed perhaps the most transcribed of all songs, "Vocalise," where the lack of a text makes it readily performable in the original by singers uncomfortable with Russian. It's nonetheless popular in many nonvocal versions.

Rhythmic and lyrical gifts were displayed on familiar ground with Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor. Matthew Kraemer led the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra in accompaniment, which was remarkably sensitive in this performance to Kasman Laude's fluctuations of tempo in the work's many solo passages. Nearly every re-entry of the orchestra was smooth; the collaboration worked to perfection. The cello section made the most of its second-movement tune. Oboist Leonid Sirotkin deserved the solo bow he got amid the ovation at the end. 

The soloist was comfortable bringing out the virtuoso qualities in a composition often underrated in terms of its display opportunities. Again, she was effusively charismatic. The orchestra, which functions well outside its home base (the Schrott Center at Butler University), preceded its partnership function with a majestic account of Mozart's Overture to "La Clemenza di Tito."