Carnets de là-bas

“I see Natalija Shakhovskaya again, playing Khachaturian.
I watch and listen.
She must be thirty-two.
I can’t put into words what fascinates me.
Time must pass
for her image to grow even clearer."

Sonia Wieder-Atherton

___

Text by Daniele Cassandro

After graduating in Paris, Franco-American cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton set off for Moscow in 1980, where she would spend two years studying with the great Soviet soloist Natalija Shakhovskaya. Carnets de là-bas—“Notebooks from Over There”—is an intimate diary of music, memory, and reflection that takes her back to a Soviet Union that now feels impossibly distant, to a formidable teacher, and to a younger self—barely in her twenties—full of awe and hope.

Accompanying this journey through time, beyond what was once an impenetrable Iron Curtain, is the music of Monteverdi, Bach, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, and Vivaldi, “sung” by her cello—the instrument closest of all to the human voice. The thread that binds Wieder-Atherton’s memories and reflections is the sound of that very cello, the one she brought with her to Moscow on a morning in 1980.

We know well the stories of those who braved the Iron Curtain westward—athletes, artists, dancers, musicians, scholars, writers. Less known are the journeys in the opposite direction. Wieder-Atherton was one of the few who crossed from West to East. She recalls already being on the train at Paris’s Gare du Nord, poised to depart without yet having her visa. She knew someone from the embassy would toss it through the open window. Her only certainty was that at the other end, in Moscow, she would find the great Natalija Shakhovskaya—herself once a student of Mstislav Rostropovich.

Their encounter was electric. Between recollections of Stalinist totalitarianism, of the Siberia where Shakhovskaya had been born, and moments of laughter tinged with bitterness, Wieder-Atherton discovered not only a brilliant performer and teacher but a woman of remarkable depth, warmth, and intellect.

The old Soviet Union moved at a muffled, almost slowed-down rhythm, in stark contrast to the capitalist West. Yet beneath the surface, change was stirring. For the young cellist, pre-Perestroika Moscow became a kind of enchanted place—not only the guardian of a great musical tradition but a space where music itself was approached in an entirely different way.

Natalija Shakhovskaya, under the influence of Rostropovich, had learned to see music from a radically expanded perspective. In a 2019 documentary, the Soviet cellist recalled how her teacher made her learn every orchestral part, not just her own. He would spring surprise questions: “Now play the bassoon part. Now the clarinet…” Studying a score with Rostropovich, she said, was like looking at a blank page on which he pointed out things you had never noticed before—a blot here, a dot there.

Shakhovskaya passed this same attention to detail, this same freedom of vision, to her young student—who was instantly captivated.

In Wieder-Atherton’s memory, Soviet Russia resembles Europe during the 2020–2021 lockdown: empty streets, deep silence, and a lingering sense of fear and oppression. But also, a vast mental space for thought and imagination.

It was during those days of confinement that she began to write—to find words for the music of her favorite composers, from the Baroque masters to the great Russians, and to recall her time in Moscow, dominated by the towering figure of Shakhovskaya.

“During the 2020 lockdown, I began writing about my years in the Soviet Union,” says the cellist. “I followed the thread of memory, trying to capture each scene as it surfaced. I recorded myself. I called these writings the Moscow Notebooks. It was before the war broke out.”

At a certain point, however, these notebooks from over there ceased to be private. Wieder-Atherton shared them with French filmmaker and opera director Clément Cogitore, who began developing a performance that would unite her cello’s voice with video projections—a recollection brought to life in sound, form, color, and story before the audience’s eyes.

On stage, Wieder-Atherton moves freely through a set defined by gauzy screens onto which images are projected. Sometimes she stands in front of them; at other times, light makes the projections seem to pass through her. Cogitore’s aim is to generate a narrative tension between live presence and recorded memory—a poetic dissonance between presence and absence. The projections themselves alternate between hyper-definition and evanescence.

Cogitore draws on a rich array of material: Soviet archival footage from the 1980s, newspaper clippings, photographs, old home videos, and family snapshots. At times, he invents an imaginary archive of false documents—piles of papers evoking a buried past slowly pieced back together, fragment by fragment.

“Clément listened to me,” Wieder-Atherton says, “and from that came the idea of connecting our worlds.
I entrusted him with these shards of memory that never leave me—and above all, with the enduring presence of one face: that of Natalija Shakhovskaya”.

“That’s where I always returned. To her home,” she writes in her notebooks. “In the evenings, seated face to face at her table, we talked. About her childhood, the vegetation of Siberia, about what it means to approach music formally or informally. About Shostakovich, about people, about war… Until the early hours of the morning. That’s where I rested, that’s where I rebuilt myself. She is gone now. But I still return there. I still sit in the same place.”

Sonia Wieder-Atherton and Clément Cogitore began work on this project before Russia invaded Ukraine, igniting a new war. In 2025, the Iron Curtain is gone—but Russia feels, in some ways, more distant than it did forty years ago.

Carnets de là-bas reminds us—now more than ever—that it is up to us to build bridges, even when the world around us seems to be falling apart.