Mozart: Piano Sonatas Vol.4 - K.279 K.280 K.284

Orli Shaham continues her survey of Mozart's complete Piano Sonatas in this, the fourth of a six-volume set. Shaham is revered as a "thrillingly expressive" interpreter of Mozart's works, bringing "technical virtuosity and deftness" to performances that "connect directly with an audience". Of the project as a whole, Orli Shaham says: "It has been eye-opening to look at the totality of [Mozart's] output across these sonatas. Of course, I knew them and had heard them so many times. But I had only ever thought about them in isolation, one sonata at a time, or about the small groups of three or four works written in close succession. When you become open to all eighteen sonatas as one body of work, you discover that the breadth of ideas, types of sounds, and depth of expression they contain are quite mind-boggling." The artistic genius in Mozart is that he leaves the performer to capture the mood in the music, and this Orli Shaham does with aplomb, the studio environment for this recording encouraging her to experiment and "go all out" with ornamentation, adding or subtracting trills and grace notes with successive takes.