New Classical Tracks: Orli Shaham, 'Brahms Inspired'

Orli Shaham - Brahms Inspired (Canary Classics)

"I remember being 7 or 8, and by that time Gil would have been 12 or 13, and he already knew so much about the composers and their lives and about how music is put together. And it was incredibly inspirational for me to be able to grow up with that."

That's Orli Shaham. She's a professional pianist, a wife, a mother to twin eight-year-old boys, and a baby sister who grew up in a pretty cool musical family. "Not only did I have my brother, Gil, but our older brother, Shai, who at the time played piano — he still does though now he's a scientist," she says. "We think of him as the smart one in the family."

Orli also grew up listening to the music of Johannes Brahms, the German Romantic composer of the late 19th century, who was also a pianist. And she wasn't so sure she liked his music. "I really remember being 10 years old and my brothers were listening to these Brahms symphonies and I just kept saying, 'This music is too loud!'" Orli recalls. "And I would get very angry at them. And it was only six, seven years later that I started to realize, 'Well, it hadn't been loud in volume, it was just loud in intensity.' And I couldn't handle that level of emotional intensity as a 10-year-old, which is probably understandable.

"He speaks so directly to the soul and he just cuts right through any veneer that might be there. And you have to be prepared for that as a person and within yourself. And little by little, I started discovering the piano pieces. And even in my late teens, I discovered the late piano pieces and I just thought they were incredible and world altering, and they've stayed that way for me."

Orli's newest project, Brahms Inspired, features the composer's late piano works and other compositions inspired by him. "I love this idea that Brahms is kind of a link in the chain that continues to speak across the centuries," Orli says. "That he channels the music that came before him and he continues to inspire composers to the present day.

"He spent so much time studying the music of previous composers, to the point where he was the editor of a lot of first editions of their manuscripts. So he was pouring over every note and deciding: Is that an F sharp or an F natural, and why? Why did that composer write in this way and how did that speak or how didn't it? And how do I want to use what I've learned from this? And this was something he spent so much of his time doing. And as a result, I think his music continues to speak to musicians today.

"And when I approached a couple of the composers I commissioned for this project, and all I said to them was, 'I'd like you to be inspired by late Brahms' — I mean, they all leapt at the chance."

Orli says putting this recording together was a little like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. In fact, one of works she commissioned was composed by Orli's former Juilliard professor Bruce Adolphe, who creates the "Piano Puzzler" for American Public Media's Performance Today. "And to be able to ask the person who really introduced me to what it is that Brahms is doing in his music — when I play the Brahms Piano Quintet, I still play from the score that we used in Bruce Adolphe's theory class when I was a junior in high school," Orli says. "And it still has my harmonic analysis from class at the bottom … sort of the first moments when I began to understand how the music is put together in the first place. I didn't want him to imitate Brahms; I wanted him to write himself in a Brahmsian way. And he's really done that with this Intermezzo, my inner Brahms, both absolutely beautiful and stunning and uniquely Bruce Adolphe, despite the Brahms you can hear within."

Bruce Adolphe's "My Inner Brahms" is followed by a beautiful Impromptu. "That impromptu is one of my favorite pieces ever," Orli says, "and I think Schubert was such a big influence on Brahms. I think Brahms learned so much from Schubert about how to take the Lied — we go back to singing. It's all about Lieder and songs. How to take the Lied and put it simply in the piano to eliminate the voice but nevertheless have the feeling of somebody singing. And that impromptu is the perfect example of that way of dealing with the voices within the instrument."

And here's something I discovered while listening to this new recording: Brahms was inspired by Chopin. "That's … probably my favorite inclusion in the album from the pieces that preceded Brahms," Orli says. "Because generally we don't think of Brahms and Chopin in the same breath. And so I decided to include this piece, this Berceuse, partly because it's a lullaby and Brahms is so famous for his lullaby, and also because the pieces in Op 117 are lullabies in their own way. And even more specifically, this particular Berceuse … I'm pretty sure that he actually quotes directly from it in his Romance in Op. 118, No. 5. There's a middle section that's based on the same premise of the way of putting the hands together. And there's even a spot of about two or three measures that it's almost a direct quotation, and I think this was Brahms' way of paying homage to Chopin."

Brahms Inspired, a new two-CD compilation that Orli Shaham says will truly stir your soul. "And I think probably the most single most rewarding aspect of this for me has just been kind of sequestering myself and immersing myself in this late Brahmsian world," she says. "I think it's changed probably everything I do as a pianist. I've learned so much from [Brahms]. I think these composers would say the same thing, the ones we commissioned. I think he just has so much to teach us."

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