‘Love and the Devil’ is aptly titled. From the delicacy
of Cantique d’amour, the occasional grotesqueries of the Scherzo and
March, the charming pliancy of Gretchen and the devilish demands of
the Réminiscences de Don Juan this is assuredly a test of fingers,
sinew and, not least, lyrical affiliations. Shehori is, in any case,
formidably well equipped when it comes to this literature as he has
elsewhere displayed on the Cembal d’Amour label. And when it comes to
Liszt he takes on something of the leonine drive of pianists of the
Golden Age. Which is not to imply a lack of sensitivity – far from it
– because the recital starts with the Cantique d’amour, the final number
in the set of Poetic and Religious Harmonies – typically most pianists
will prefer the seventh of the set, Funérailles, or maybe the
third, Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude. So it’s doubly
good that Shehori has the courage to begin with the romantic tracery
of this piece, which, in his hands, doesn’t exclude some expressive
power either. The Scherzo and March which follows, in complete contradistinction,
is a twelve-minute tour de force of dramatic fissures; the fugal episode
embedded in the strata of this amazingly vivid and occasionally problematic
work gets more and more hot house in this performance. Thunderous bass
lines leap from the page and in the March the rapping bass and Shehori’s
commensurately hardened tone build up a veritable head of steam – though
he remains alert to the dynamic implications here despite the temptation
to pile drive.
Gretchen, the arrangement of the second movement from
the Faust Symphony, is not as popular discographically as I’d have expected.
Shehori is sensitive and pliant here – and has a spatial awareness that
maintains intensity over a seventeen-minute span, not an easy thing
to accomplish in this work. The only problem is a mechanical noise –
because the recording is made at quite a low level it’s intermittently
audible, and I assume it’s the piano’s action. The Liszt-Schubert Gretchen
is properly drama-laced and elevated, and Ständchen is full of
the kind of panache that reminded me of Simon Barere, as, indeed did
the Don Juan which contains some formidable surmounting of technical
minefields and plenty of rhythmic and structural acuity. The recital
ends with the warhorse Mephisto Waltz, laced with colouristic drama.
Drama, indeed, and drive animate this recital but so
too does sensitivity and shading. Apart from the mechanical disturbance
in Gretchen the sound is pleasing and Shehori’s own notes enthusiastically
to the point.
Jonathan Woolf
Mordecai Shehori (piano)