Orli Shaham and members of Pacific Symphony: American Tapestry
Pacific Symphony

Pianist Orli Shaham has received deserved acclaim for her recorded volumes of Mozart's complete piano sonatas—certainly a career high-water mark for any classical pianist—but that years-long project is but one of her many accomplishments. She's on the piano and chamber music faculty at The Juilliard School, has delivered recitals and performed with orchestras around the world, and issued over a dozen releases on Deutsche Gramophone, Sony, and other labels. Shaham's also been the curator, host, and pianist of Pacific Symphony's Cafe Ludwig chamber music series for eighteen years, and it's through her connection with the Southern California-based ensemble that her latest release, American Tapestry, has come to fruition. It had long been a dream of hers to create a recording that would document her relationship with the company, and now here it is.

American Tapestry doesn't feature the tried-and-true but instead performances of material by renowned living American composers such as Sarah Kirkland Snider and Reena Esmail, two of eight whose works appear; it's worth noting too that those by Margaret Brouwer and Avner Dorman were commissioned by Pacific Symphony and are world premiere recordings. Representing the Pacific Symphony are bassist Richard Cassarino, violist Meredith Crawford, trumpeter Tony Ellis, cellist Warren Hagerty, violinist Dennis Kim, clarinetist Joshua Ranz, and flutist Benjamin Smolen. The musicians appear in differing configurations when pieces are scored for quartet, trio, duo, sextet, and in one case solo piano. The release testifies to the vitality of the music American composers are creating and also reflects the diversity of their compositional voices.

Inspired by Michael Gard's wire sculptures, Viet Cuong's Wax and Wire translates the sculptor's process into jittery musical form, using what the composer calls musical “smears” to sonically reflect the titular duality. Much as wax melts way in a Gard wire sculpture to expose the wire component, in Cuong's piece “smears” of chromatic piano scales successively collide with clarinet and violin gestures to facilitate their gradual melting away. Playful energy and animation provide immediate appeal, while the plunging, ear-tickling glissandi of the violin and jazzy klezmer-inflected flourishes of the clarinet amplify the work's individuating character. Darting movements and siren phrases also make this quartet performance an excellent stage-setter.

Wanting to create a piano trio as a wedding gift for a close friend and her soon-to-be-husband, Esmail extracted the slow movement from her recent Clarinet Concerto to produce Saans, certainly one of the album's most lyrical and beautiful pieces. As Shaham's piano dances and sparkles, Kim and Hagerty articulate a passionate romantic bond in the graceful sweep of their violin and cello entanglements (the melismatic coda's a particular thing of beauty). Esmail's star has justifiably risen, and this stirring contribution to the project shows why. Rivaling her piece for lyricism is Peter Dayton's atmospheric Fantasy when violist Crawford partners eloquently with Shaham. The five-minute setting unfolds in a fantasia-like manner with long viola lines flowing as in a dream and impressions unspooling with exquisite, Debussy-like poise.

Composed during the pandemic for Shaham and members of the Pacific Symphony and taking inspiration from Schumann's contrasting alter egos, the fiery Florestan and reflective Eusebius, Avner Dorman's four-part Sextet is the album's sole multi-movement work and musically exemplifies the extremes personified by the figures. The rapid fire of Ellis's trumpet lends the opening “Allegro” a celebratory, carnival-esque quality that recalls Nino Rota. Hammering chords imbue the movement with a machine-like intensity. Responding to the Florestan energy of the first movement, the stately “Andante” is Eusebius's gentle rejoinder. “Hocket” reinstates the wilder of the alter egos, the music careening and the pace torrential—even if a slower, shadowy chorale eventually seizes control. At work's end, Dorman acknowledges his debt to Schumann by folding a reference from his Piano Quintet into “Scherzo,” a rush hour hustle'n'bustle of syncopations and ostinatos.

Arriving after Dorman's sextet arrangement, the unaccompanied piano treatment of Snider's The Currents rewards. Slow, intoxicating waves of patterns bolster the material's mystical and poetic effects, the piece a dramatic, eight-minute excursion into lyrical evocation. Ari Barack Fisher perpetuates the tone with his Romance, composed during his undergraduate days at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and given an impassioned reading by cellist Hagerty and Shaham. Also written during the pandemic period, Jessie Montgomery's Peace explores the sadness of that time and its early days. Feelings of of shock, confusion, and dismay are intimated by violinist Kim and Shaham during the opening moments before a sense of calm asserts itself. As the title of Brouwer's Parallel Isolations implies, the work, commissioned in 2020 by Pacific Symphony, was designed to be streamed during the pandemic with the four musicians playing their parts from home. Again a nervous, unsettled intro slowly gives way to a roller coaster of emotions, creeping anxiety but also exuberant joy, as the six minutes pass.

May 2026