Following her acclaimed Mozart concertos release Orli Shaham embarks on the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas.
“[A] first-rate Mozartean” - Chicago Tribune
“Mozart’s three B-flat sonatas are so varied and different in their inventive brilliance. Each has a truly individual and distinct voice, yet together they stand on a timeline that clearly maps Mozart’s development from his late teens to full maturity.” - Orli Shaham
This is the first release in Orli Shaham’s project to document Mozart’s eighteen piano sonatas. She possesses an enviable reputation as a Mozartean, with press and critics dwelling on her “thrillingly expressive” approach matched with “technical virtuosity and deftness” culminating in “performances that connects directly with an audience.” This is her first solo Mozart offering and follows her recording of the Mozart Violin Sonatas with brother, violinist Gil Shaham, for Canary Classics, along with her acclaimed release last year of Mozart Piano Concertos conducted by David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony.
Mozart’s singing line and its translation to the piano has served as Orli Shaham’s constant guide in her interpretations of Mozart. While analysis of, harmony, rhythm and phrasing have played an important part, Orli Shaham is adamant that the vocal nature of each sonata is paramount. K.333 starts out as would Mozart’s operas, as a single melodic idea as Orli Shaham says, “Mozart taught the keyboard to sing.”
The B-flat sonatas stand individually as emblems of Mozart’s inventive brilliance, three distinct universes, albeit all formed from the same raw materials.
The artistic genius in Mozart is that he leaves the performer to capture the mood in the music and this Orli Shaham does with aplomb, the studio environment for this recording encouraging her to experiment and “go all out” with ornamentation, adding or subtracting trills and grace notes with successive takes.
Recording in her favourite recording venue, Mechanics Hall, she fully explores the pathos and cultivates the humour in Mozart’s B-flat sonatas. In her own words, “he had such insight into what it means to be human and had to get that out in his music. Mozart was superhuman in what he was able to do... but that never comes across in music that is so human.”
