MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : Pianist Will Play Mozart Her Own Way : Soloist Nadia Nechama Weintraub to Perform an Oft-Overshadowed Work Sunday With the Camerata

In about two months in the Lenten season of 1784, Mozart wrote no fewer than four piano concertos, all but the last of them (No. 17) largely overshadowed today by his later achievements in this form.

But pianist Nadia Nechama Weintraub wants to make a case for Concerto No. 15, K. 450.

“It has a lot of charm and is really exquisite,” Weintraub said Monday in a phone interview from her apartment in New York City. She will be soloist in the work with the Mozart Camerata, led by founder Ami Porat on Sunday afternoon in Newport Beach. Porat also will conduct music by Haydn and Schubert.

The concerto is “a very positive piece, very lively, very brilliant,” Weintraub said. “There are some dark shadows in the second movement. But when I hear this piece, the Mozart genius is so overwhelming and the music is so delightfully pure that it just elevates you.

“That’s the whole point of going to this kind of concert and listening to this kind of music,” she continued. “It’s an elevation of the spirit. It makes you go to another plane, rise to another plane.”

Weintraub has been involved with music since she received her first lessons as a child from her father, a bass and voice teacher, and her mother, also a singer. Born in New York in 1967, she began playing professionally even before the family moved to Israel when she was 6. She said her middle name means “consolation” in Hebrew.

“I was named after my grandfather,” she said.

Although practicing meant she had “to give up long trips, hiking, things that would interfere and take me away from the instrument,” she did not consider it a deprivation.

“I loved it. To go to Germany, to be in Vienna at 11--why not? As a youngster, I was always playing concerts, more concerts and more concerts.”

She didn’t make the full commitment to pursuing a professional career until she was in her teens, however.

“That’s the most crucial time for any young artist, around 16 or 17, because you have to invest a lot of time in the maturing process to become an adult and everything.

“When you’re much younger, your music-making is more instinctive. Later, you think, ‘Where is this phrasing going? What is this leading into?’ You have higher standards. All your thoughts have to go into it.”

She moved back to New York when she was 18 to attend the Juilliard School in New York, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music. She splits her time between New York and Israel.

“Every time I go back, it’s being home a little bit,” she said.

When Weintraub plays here, she will be more true to her own vision than to dictates from the historical-practice movement, which advocates re-creating the original conditions of the composer’s day.

“There are some specialists that do it this way,” she said. “I think the people who investigate and try to research the exact way--no one will ever know for sure--all the more (credit) to them. They research it. I look at it from the musical point of view.”

The 15th Concerto is “so perfect and so straightforward, I don’t think you have to mess around with anything else. I don’t think that you have to dwell on whether I should play it in this manner or that manner.”

So she will be playing “absolutely” on a modern grand. “I think if Mozart were alive, he would probably prefer the Steinway nine-foot grand to what he played on,” she said, referring to fledgling fortepianos of his day.

When not playing or practicing, Weintraub likes to walk on the beach, jog, paint or hang out in cafes.

“I like to talk with friends because I think it’s a pretty lonely thing to be practicing, working with the instrument, and I think my free time I enjoy spending with people that I care about.”

Weintraub turned 26 last month and says over the past decade she has “come to the realization of what I really like to perform for people and what I like to interpret.”

“If I choose a piece, I want to say I have something to say with that piece. That’s important. . . . Ten years ago, I don’t think I really knew what I wanted to play.

“Obviously, it’s important to take from different composers, eras, and then you feel what you really have a touch for. Nobody can play everything and all periods, and you can’t play all composers in the best way you can. It’s just an individual thing.”

Weintraub prefers the Romantics, but like most musicians reveres Mozart, too.

“I love playing Mozart,” she said. “Mozart is the highest of the highest level of music.”

* Nadia Nechama Weintraub will be piano soloist in Mozart’s Concerto No. 15 with the Mozart Camerata, led by Ami Porat on Sunday at 4 p.m. at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 600 St. Andrews Road, Newport Beach. The program also includes the Overture to Haydn’s “L’Infedelta Delusa” and Schubert’s Symphony No. 5. $14 to $29. (714) 631-2233.