"Signs of a Poet and a Daredevil” (Headline)
"Fiery display of muscle, with poetic undercurrents to remind listeners that there is art within this music’s gymnastic contours. It is this balance of daredevil showmanship and pure musicality that explains the lure of Mr. Shehori’s playing.”
The New York Times

A Recitalist to Undermine a Critic (Headline)
“About halfway through Mordecai Shehori's piano recital on Monday evening at Weill Recital Hall, it occurred to me that I was enjoying myself much too much. Part of a reviewer's duty is to pay unwavering attention to the mechanical details that form the base of any proficient performance. That, however, proved difficult to do because the techniques of playing the instrument were continually being upstaged by the music itself. The musician, whose medium just happened to be the piano, consistently got under the skin of the score and cut toward the expressive bone. Result: pure, guilty pleasure. At piano recitals especially, that happens infrequently enough to deserve mention.
Mr. Shehori, who was born in Israel and studied at the Juilliard School, has developed a cult following in New York piano circles, for good reason. He certainly possesses a suitably big technique — one does not offer the public Brahms's Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel and Liszt's arrangement of the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" without reliable fingers. Still, mindless and heartless keyboard fluency is not uncommon nowadays and perhaps never was. What sets Mr. Shehori apart from most virtuosos with their off-the-shelf performances is the poetic inwardness and rapturous intensity of his playing.”
The New York Times

“Mordecai Shehori is a musician's musician - that is, the sort of pianist whom it will profit other pianists to study. But there is no reason why the general public shouldn't know of him, too, for he brings unity, proportion, intelligence and sensitivity to all that he plays.”
New York Newsday