MA Top 30 Professional: Orli Shaham

Pianist, Educator, Radio Host
The Juilliard School, Kaufman Music Center, Pacific Symphony

At six years old, Orli Shaham first began learning a Mozart piano sonata, and now, some 40 years later, she has recorded all 18 sonatas, released as a six-CD box set by Canary Classics in November. “I saw this project both as a place for me to learn and also a place for me to suggest to other pianists where they could take this music,” Shaham says. “If you experience the sonatas as a whole, they teach you an incredible amount about how Mozart developed and thought about the piano, about sonatas,
about communication.”

Shaham leans on her experience playing contemporary music to inform her approach to Mozart and other historic composers. “There is no better teacher on how to play the work of a dead composer than playing the work of a living composer, because then you are immediately confronted by the reality of the human behind the notes.”

In her 17 years as curator, host, and pianist of Café Ludwig, the Pacific Symphony chamber music series in California, she has programmed a generous amount of new works. She and orchestra principals have recorded a soon-to-be-released album of chamber music by 21st-century American composers Margaret Brouwer, Reena Esmail, Avner Dorman, Viet Cuong, Jessie Montgomery, Ari Fischer, Peter Dayton, and Sarah Kirkland Snider.

Off the concert stage, Shaham, who is married to conductor David Robertson and is one of violinist Gil Shaham’s siblings, is widely involved in music education. She is on the piano and chamber music faculty of the Juilliard School; she is artistic director of the interactive children’s concert series Orli Shaham’s Bach Yard; and in several episodes a year, she is co-host and creator of NPR’s From the Top, on which she interviews and performs with teenage artists.

Shaham is chair of the board of trustees of New York’s Kaufman Music Center, which includes the Special Music School, a K-12 public school, and the Lucy Moses School, Manhattan’s largest community arts school. Also at the center is Merkin Concert Hall, where the pianist has a long history. “I recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of my debut at Merkin. I remember that I played the Schubert A-major sonata.”