Shehori Plays Russian Music : CEMBAL D’AMOUR CD143 [JW]: Classical Music Reviews

Mordecai Shehori’s Russian album starts the hard way, with a commanding, fluent and utterly authoritative performance of Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata. Of course one can programme things any way one wants but artists and companies make statements in the way they line up a miscellaneous programme. In this case, we go straight for the emotive jugular, and allow the Old School virtuosity of Islamey and the colouristic charm of the Tchaikovsky triptych to follow.

The bright recording quality suits Shehori’s sense of projection very appropriately. He is a master of the sonata’s quixotic moods, its splenetic moments as well as its more sanguine-melancholic ones. He avoids the assault course mentality prevalent in some circles, and also takes a different and fruitfully divergent approach to that of, say, Richter whose more militant, militaristic vision is powerfully probing in its own right [I’m citing Parnassus PACD 96-001/2, a 1958 recording]. Shehori is more intent on exploring the stases and tentative measures inherent in the moment, taking a structurally cohesive, wide-spanning control. The central movement is striking for its reserve and song without words quality in its opening paragraphs, and also in the slow build up to its more chiselled aural profile. The return to the opening feeling is affectingly accomplished. Unleashed and duly replenished, the finale emerges as a pent up outburst of brilliantly alive pianism. It ends a performance of excellence.

Lyric but intensely virtuosic Shehori dispatches The Skylark with an acute ear for the tensions embodied in this vortex pull between emotive states; marvellous theatrical projection without any corresponding fakery. The three Tchaikovsky pieces are examples of refined and indeed refulgent lyric poetry – the Lark (another one) – as well as the more burnished warmth of the Romance in F minor. The last of the three serves in fact as an ‘encore’ to the preceding two; the Dumka, with its sense of rolling tristesse, has ebullience and style but also a melancholic trajectory that Shehori never fails to locate but never objectifies.

Islamey receives a traversal of fiery and evocative concentration, the virtuoso demands co-existing with the alluring colouration that lend the work so formidable a construction. And then there is the far more unusual, discographically rare Tchaikovsky-Pabst Paraphrase after the opera Eugene Onegin. Laced with refined tracery, delicate trills and also graced by a tumult of virtuoso demands, and colour, this work demands the absolute in rhythmic control as much as anything. Shehori brings an immense sense of weight and dynamism to bear and he copes with some of its more unremitting challenges with tremendous eloquence. In that spot where a new material with multiple voices is introduced, at 3:30, there is an abrupt shift in timing and texture (suddenly "Seco") that could signal a possible edit or may be just the result of an extreme angular tonal and rhythmic shift, a device that apparently Mr. Shehori employs on other occasions as well.

In any case the Russian album establishes a repertoire-rich undertaking from Shehori. The recording dates and locations vary – between Las Vegas and New York – but the performance level and values never dip.

Jonathan Woolf

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