Orli Shaham: Mozart: The Complete Piano Sonatas Vol. 4
Canary Classics

Some performers endure crippling stage fright before going onstage, others can't wait to be before an audience. I won't pretend to know which camp pianist Orli Shaham falls into, but given the evidence at hand I'm betting it's the latter. The comfort level she shows on this fourth volume of Mozart's piano sonatas is evident from the first note, and the impression forms of someone totally conversant with the material and excited to share it with others. Never is there hesitation in her playing or uncertainty in her choices. As much as this piano and chamber music faculty member of The Juilliard School is clearly “a first-rate Mozartean” (The Chicago Tribune's astute assessment), her pianistic expertise extends to multiple composers, not just one. She's issued recordings featuring material by Steven Mackey, Prokofiev, and John Adams, among others, and released the album Nigunim, Hebrew Classics on Canary Classics too. That said, there's no question Mozart holds a special place in her heart.

The eagerness she brings to the performances extends to her liner note commentaries, which are brief in the extreme. She describes the Sonata in C Major, No. 1, K.279 as having “a theme that isn't really a melody”; of the Sonata in F Major, No. 2, K.280, she highlights Mozart's deployment of pauses to draw the listener in; and of the Sonata in D Major, No. 6, K.284, “Dürnitz,” she makes note of his decision to devote its final movement to variations. The three are from a set of six what she calls "calling cards” Mozart presented to potential benefactors during a Munich excursion in the mid-1770s (he would later repeat the gesture during visits to Mannheim and Paris). With that in mind, it makes sense that he would purposefully include details that would distinguish one from another. While the idea of selling his wares might seem undignified from our present-day vantage point, bear in mind that at that time he was still young and trying to make a name for himself.

The second sonata begins the release with a radiant allegro that's wholly charming, its breeziness all the more enticing when executed with delight and skill by Shaham. The word eloquent comes to mind in her essaying of the adagio, and the attention given to dynamic contrasts is sensitive in the extreme. The exuberant finale is breathlessly delivered, its “Presto” marking wholly apt. Appearing next, the opening movement of the first sonata is even more effervescent than its counterpart in the second. The first's graceful andante is less plaintive than the second's adagio, though no less beguiling for that. Shaham's virtuosity is called upon for the light-speed runs that cascade through the bright closing allegro, but she executes them, of course, with consummate precision. Whereas the K.279 and K.280 are alike in structure and duration, the K.284 is longer by half at thirty minutes and, as stated, exchanges the standard closing allegro for a lengthy set of variations, seventeen minutes of them to be exact. After a stately, high-energy allegro and pensive, trills-enhanced andante initiate the trip, the closing movement ventures far afield, ranging as it does from lilting episodes to ebullient ones. Room's made for hushed ones, too, and the tender variation that arises at the thirteen-minute mark, so beautifully rendered by Shaham, is a definite album highlight.

August 2023