Pianist Mordecai Shehori has developed a steady New York following over the past two decades, along with a reputation for his colorful, sometimes idiosyncratic approach to Romantic repertoire. Unlike many younger pianists who benefited from Vladimir Horowitz’s friendship and advice, Shehori resisted even the slightest temptation to imitate his mentor, a fact that Horowitz himself acknowledged and appreciated.
The subtext of Love and the Devil governs Shehori’s choice of material for this first of a projected Liszt series. It begins with an expansively phrased, full-bodied reading of the composer’s seldom-played Cantique d’amour. The equally rare and technically daunting Scherzo and March fares best when both registers of the piano are being worked at full force, yet Shehori’s pianism lacks the rhythmic center and supple filigree you find in Horowitz’s extraordinary 1967 live performance (Sony). By contrast, in Liszt’s transcription of the Faust Symphony’s central Gretchen movement Shehori weaves intimate, songful patterns that float over the bar lines more convincingly than Leslie Howard’s relatively sober, earthbound traversal. Ständchen stands out among the two Schubert/Liszt songs, while the spinning accompaniment in Gretchen am Spinnrade sometimes obscures the foreground melody line.
Shehori’s Don Juan Fantasy and Mephisto Waltz No. 1 admirably aspire to the grand manner. But their basic pulse turns heavy-handed whenever the pianist broadens a phrase for rhetorical emphasis or slows down in order to get his fingers around a particularly sticky passage (Don Juan’s double notes in the intro and taxing coda, or Mephisto’s notorious right-hand skips). In a word, effortlessness is often missing.
The engineering sounds as if two microphones had been shoved into a concert grand housed in a dry, airless, studio-apartment living room. Where’s the resonance and dynamic range this music cries out for? Not on this recording, that’s for sure. If Shehori truly likes the recorded sound he gets, more power to him. Next to hundreds of more adequately engineered Liszt discs crowding the bins (many featuring performances as good as or better than this one), I don’t see this release reaching audiences beyond the pianist’s acolytes, his friends and students, and hard-core Liszt groupies. Perhaps that was Shehori’s intention…
