A Mozart “Bonus” from Pianist Orli Shaham
By: STEPHEN SMOLIAR
Not long after the imposition of shelter-in-place, I discovered that I was receiving regular press releases from Classical Music Communications involving the activities of pianist Orli Shaham. These seemed to be part of a MidWeek Mozart series that was providing audio previews of Shaham’s current project to record the piano sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Every now and then, however, video content would be introduced; and, at the beginning of April, I discussed a video of a recital presented by students in the Conservatory of Music division of the Colburn School in Los Angeles. Shaham not only coached the students but also contributed her piano work to their chamber music selections. A couple of weeks later I reported on Shaham participating in Music Never Sleeps NYC with her husband, conductor David Robertson. Their contribution to this 24-hour marathon was a performance of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music,” subsequently posted as a YouTube file.
As of last night, there is now a video account of Shaham playing Mozart. This is not a sonata recital. Rather, it is a recording of a performance by the Pacific Symphony, based in Orange County, of Mozart’s K. 453 concerto in G major. Shaham is the soloist under the baton of Carl St. Clair. The performance took place on May 20, 2017 in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. The Web page for this concert excerpt will be available for viewing through September 26.
We are used to thinking of Mozart’s piano concertos as platforms from which Mozart could show off his many talents. However, after Mozart moved to Vienna, he realized that taking on students would provide a useful revenue source; and one of those students, Barbara Ployer, was the soloist when K. 453 was performed. Most likely, Mozart conducted; and, at that same concert, the two of them played his K. 448 sonata for two pianos in D major. There is no doubt that Mozart had more than his fair share of the spotlight at this particular performance.
When we listen to a Mozart piano concerto, we tend to focus on the many technical hoops through which the soloist is obliged to jump. While there is no doubt that technical display was a primary “show-off” factor in any of those concertos, there are many other factors that contribute to the overall rhetorical tone. The selection of the key is one of those factors, and it is worth noting how few of those concertos are written in a minor key. Having now had a generous share of opportunities to listen to these concertos in performance, I have to say that one of the strongest rhetorical indicators is instrumentation: What instruments contribute to the ensemble beyond the “usual suspects” in the string section; and what are their respective dispositions?
The instrumentation is relatively familiar where K. 453 is concerned. There are pairs of oboes, bassoons, and horns, along with a single flute. The very sonorities of these instruments embody any number of rhetorical connotations, and there was much to admire in how St. Clair scaled down his string section to allow those connotations to flourish. My only regret was that the video crew tended to undermine those connotations due to a failure to plan in advance for which winds would be playing when. Indeed, while St. Clair and Shaham collaborated brilliantly in the tightly-knit fabric of this concerto, the video direction dropped too many stitches for that fabric to cohere sufficiently. As a result, one could probably come away with a better appreciation of the relationship between soloist and conductor by concentrating only on the audio.
On the other hand, there was much to enjoy when the camera turned to Shaham. When I watched her working with the Colburn students, I was particularly impressed by the physical cues she delivered to pull her students together as a coordinated team. Where K. 453 was concerned, those cues had less to do with teamwork with the orchestra and more as signs of when Mozart probably took particular delight in several of the inventive passages in his score. There was a prevailing sense that personality signified as much as technical skill, leaving me to wonder whether or not such personal traits ever figured in how Mozart had coached Ployer for her performance of this concerto.
The video also included Shaham’s encore following the conclusion of the concerto. She decided to go with Alexander Siloti’s richly pianistic arrangement of BWV 855a, the prelude from the E minor prelude-fugue coupling in the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 855). Siloti transposed the key to B minor and introduced a generous share of highly pianistic techniques that would not have been suitable for any instrument at Bach’s disposal. As a result, what began as yet another vehicle for Bach’s approach to pedagogy was transformed into a “meditation” couched in the rich rhetorical techniques of the late nineteenth century. (For the record, Siloti first performed this arrangement in 1912, but it is clear where his heart was!)