Xander Benham is embarking on a long-term project: the complete piano sonatas of Kapustin. He takes up that challenge with the determination of someone who knows exactly why.
Nikolai Kapustin is one of those composers about whom everyone who knows him becomes enthusiastic, yet who remains significantly underestimated by the general public. The Ukrainian-Russian pianist and composer (1937–2020) grew up in the Soviet Union, studied at the Moscow Conservatory, and harbored in secret a passionate love for jazz – a genre that was politically suspect in his homeland. His answer to that paradox was as ingenious as it was uncompromising: he wrote out the jazz completely. No improvisation, no lead sheets, but fully notated music that sounds as if it is being created on the spot. Classical architecture, with a soul of jazz.
The result is a peculiar body of work that resists easy categorization – too jazzy for the classical concert hall, too strictly notated for the jazz club – and perhaps for that very reason remained in the shadows for so long. Once someone discovers Kapustin, they become addicted to it. And that brings us to Xander Benham.
The English pianist, now based in Utrecht, became acquainted with Kapustin during his bachelor's degree at City, University of London, and has not let him go since. He immersed himself in the Concert Etudes and gave a rare performance of Kapustin's Second Piano Concerto in the Netherlands as the finale of his master's at HKU Utrecht Conservatorium – a work that was barely known here until then. Since then, he regularly performs Kapustin in concerts. Now he is taking a step that no pianist has taken before: he is going to record the complete cycle of twenty piano sonatas, one by one.
The first recording will be available from 1 June 2026 on all streaming platforms: Piano Sonata No. 1, opus 39, better known as the Sonata-Fantasia, written in 1984. The work is in four movements – Vivace, Largo, Scherzo, and Allegro molto – and lasts approximately twenty-one minutes. It is technically demanding, full of rhythmic complexity, virtuosic turns, and that characteristic Kapustin tension between notated precision and apparent spontaneity. Benham studied it from May 2023 and only recorded it in October 2025 at Trypoul Studios in the Dutch town of Neerkant. More than two years for one sonata – that is not a scheduling problem, but seriousness.
What characterizes this project is the conviction behind it. Benham does not see Kapustin as a curiosity or as a hybrid between genres, but as a composer of substance who deserves a rightful place in the repertoire. That standpoint is defensible, and it is good that someone is backing it up with actions.
Kapustin worked his entire life in relative obscurity – his scores circulated barely at all for years, his name was absent from major reference works. Interest has fortunately been growing in recent years, but a systematic documentation of the sonata cycle is still lacking. That Benham wants to fill that gap is significant in itself.
Classical music needs more pianists with a mission, not only with a program. Benham seems to know what he wants to say, and he has twenty sonatas to prove it over time. That may well be the strongest kind of promise.
More info: https://linktr.ee/xander.benham