Mordecai Shehori Plays Beethoven

[Todd]

As I finally get to the end of cycles available for purchase, and thus need only to snap up new cycles when they become available, questionable cycles remain to be addressed.  Outright frauds like Claudio Colombo can and will be ignored, but cycles like those from Dirk Herten and Mordecai Shehori raise questions about legitimacy.  Since this is about Shehori, I will address his cycle.  There are Gray Lady reviews of concerts past, and Jed Distler has reviewed some of his recordings, so clearly he's a regional artist, somewhat like Haskell Small or Esteban Sanchez.  As the latter two perfectly demonstrate, glitzy touring and recording careers are not needed for world class artistry to emerge.  With streaming, one can listen without needing to squander precious resources in this economy.  So that route was selected.

As with Riccardo Schwartz, I'll skip right to the punchline: this cycle sucks.  To be clear, it is not as bad as Schwartz's monstrosity, the most comically grotesque artistic late-term abortion this side of Myra Breckinridge.  But it is bad.  Very bad.  It's fifth tier bad, jangling amelodically and amusically with the four cycles that occupied the bottom tier until Schwartz came along to show just how bad bad can be.  As with Schwartz, the cycle is bad enough that I can't be bothered to do a full write up.  Unlike with Schwartz, one can detect actual artistry, so a bit of detail will be offered on a couple sonatas to illustrate the cycle's shortcomings.  One can rest assured that I did, in fact, slog through this entire cycle.

Take piano sonata number one.  Setting aside the sub-par recorded sound, there's not a lot to like.  The first few seconds sound unbalanced.  Then, at ten seconds exactly, there's an odd sounding micro-pause before the music proceeds.  Is it an edit?  Does Shehori clunkily reposition his hands?  Dunno.  Then comes some of the most lopsided playing I've heard, where the melody all but disappears beneath the still undernourished left hand playing.  While the Adagio is slow, it does not flow, it does not sound attractive, it does not sound coherent in places.  It's really an off-putting listening experience.  The Menuetto is off a bit, but falls within the bounds of the 130+ versions I've heard.  The slowish Prestissimo sludges, kind of blobbing around, blending legato and slow, low temperature burn playing.  It's distinctive, I guess, so there's that.

The awful fourth volume has the most disinterested tweenage student pianist take on Op 101 I've heard, while discmate 106 lowers the standard further.  The nearly fifteen minute Allegro is slow, choppy, weirdly accented, cumbersome, lumbering, clunky, and disjointed, with passages that sound like notes are just randomly played.  Cringe follows cringe.  The same more or less applies to the Scherzo, though it is mercifully shorter.  The Adagio is much less bad, but it's still bad.  Sure, it's slow, but clunk and blah creep in everywhere.  The final movement starts with a slow and not awful Largo.  The transition to the Allegro is the clunkiest I've heard with an awful edit, and the Allegro itself adds musical chunks to the clunks.  One is more aware than normal of the contrapuntal nature of the music because each musical strand in uniquely garbled and unpleasant.  Throw in some widely unbalanced contrasting dynamic levels, and one has much to cringe at.  This Hammerklavier ranks as one of the four or five worst I've heard.  I mean, it's real bad.  That written, it kept my attention the same way a bad car accident makes a driver rubberneck. 

The detailed description of the above sonatas doesn't always hold.  Op 10/1 and Op 26 bubble up to mediocre quality, for instance.  Also, Volume 3, subtitled "The Early Years", taken from live performances in the 1970s, indicates clearly that the relative suckiness of the rest of the playing relates to the artist's age.  In Op 110, Shehori delivers a perfectly acceptable live performance.  True, there are a few slips, but the approach and the playing are both personal but not eccentric, and nicely executed, if perhaps a bit lacking in transcendence or late-LvB goodness.  This sonata is basically a fourth or maybe third tier performance.  I skipped the paired G Major concerto.  Op 111 is included in one of the discs devoted to celebrated recordings from the early 1970s, and like 110, it's not bad at all.  Indeed, it's straight up third tier quality and serves as the apex of the cycle.  It should be noted that the second volume, that starts with a poor Op 109 then moves to an awful Op 81/1, concludes with the Emperor, which I also skipped.

I still do not know if this cycle is legitimate.  I do know that it is legitimately bad.