{"id":8955,"date":"2021-04-21T14:45:23","date_gmt":"2021-04-21T14:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=8955"},"modified":"2021-07-02T14:51:24","modified_gmt":"2021-07-02T14:51:24","slug":"review-imagination-and-virtuosity-in-shai-wosners-philadelphia-recital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/review-imagination-and-virtuosity-in-shai-wosners-philadelphia-recital\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Imagination and virtuosity in Shai Wosner\u2019s Philadelphia recital"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/seenandheard-international.com\/2021\/04\/imagination-and-virtuosity-in-shai-wosners-philadelphia-recital\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">From Seen and Heard International<\/a><\/p>\n<p>By Bernard Jacobson<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Virtuosity\u2019 is a double-edged (s)word. It tends to be used most often to suggest a preponderance of technical brilliance over musical substance \u2013 a sense that serious-minded readers naturally consider pejorative. But I have always thought of it as denoting the kind of technical proficiency that enables a performer to perform without needing to think consciously about technique.<\/p>\n<p>In the case of Shai Wosner, this Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital coupled the deep musical understanding I have always found in the playing of this Israeli-born pianist, now in his mid-40s, with a perfectly dazzling keyboard mastery. These virtues were deployed in the service of a program that combined ample variety of style with a less obvious cohesion of musical content.<\/p>\n<p>The first evidence of the latter quality came with the perhaps surprising affinity of expression that linked the finale of the Schubert sonata \u2013 negotiated with imperturbable panache \u2013 to the first of the three Scarlatti sonatas that Wosner had cunningly selected to follow it.<\/p>\n<p>Similar imaginative intelligence was shown in the way he interleaved the Scarlatti group with three of the comparably laconic 56 Nanosonatas that Frederic Rzewski (born in 1938) composed between 2006 and 2010, pieces \u2013 \u2018works\u2019 would be altogether too pompous a generic title for these charming jeux d\u2019esprit \u2013 that are happily free from the somewhat turgid bulk that disfigures Rzewski\u2019s best-known and politically sympathetic composition, The People United Will Never Be Defeated.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/seenandheard-international.com\/2021\/04\/imagination-and-virtuosity-in-shai-wosners-philadelphia-recital\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read the full review.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Seen and Heard International By Bernard Jacobson \u2018Virtuosity\u2019 is a double-edged (s)word. It tends to be used most often to suggest a preponderance of technical brilliance over musical substance \u2013 a sense that serious-minded readers naturally consider pejorative. But I have always thought of it as denoting the kind of technical proficiency that enables &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/review-imagination-and-virtuosity-in-shai-wosners-philadelphia-recital\/\">Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3610,3670,3612,4339,6515],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8955"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8955"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8958,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8955\/revisions\/8958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/2145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}