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Music Preview: Pianist Emanuel Ax keeps his art fresh by trying new things
Friday, October 27, 2000 By Andrew Druckenbrod, Post-Gazette Classical Music Critic
Over the past few years, pianist Emanuel Ax has occasionally turned away from the 9-foot Steinways that have made him a beloved figure within classical music. A concert pianist in the grand tradition, he has tried his hand, or rather his hands, at the period piano and the organ, with drastically different results.
The former kindled new energy in him; the latter ran into a dead end.
Ax, 51, was set to perform Copland's Symphony for Organ and Orchestra along with Brahms' formidable Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra this weekend, but pulled out of the organ piece. "The reason was that I really am not prepared to do it," he says apologetically, but honestly, over the phone. "I have never played organ. I listened to the piece and I really wanted to play it ... I just didn't realize what was involved. You have to set the organ up correctly and you have to play with your feet, which I didn't think that you had to with this piece."
It wasn't long before Ax knew he would have to call it off. "I suddenly panicked and thought, Mariss [Jansons, PSO music director] is going have a fit and it is going to sound horrible. I better just call up and say, 'Look, get somebody who knows what he's doing.' " The PSO did just that, bringing in Yale organist Thomas Murray for the Copland.
But the whole miscalculation actually highlights some of Ax's most positive artistic traits. When's the last time a major artist went out on a limb because he likes something, or ever admitted publicly he was wrong about anything? Neither happens often, and they show the guts and lack of egoism that has made Ax such a likable figure. It's fair to say these also play a role in his remarkable ability to communicate with an audience via interpretations that feel open and inviting.
"I'm trying to give so much of myself," Ax says. "I want to keep feeling that the performance is me because I have this fear that if I start separating myself from the performance that I won't be as involved."
Born in Lvov, Poland, Ax began piano lessons at 6 in Warsaw. In 1961, his family moved to Canada and he headed for New York, where he still resides, to study at the Juilliard School. He first performed in Pittsburgh at the Y Music Society in 1974. "I remember it with great fondness," he says. "I was a replacement for someone in a young concert series that they used to run at the Y. It was one of my first recitals, period."
Far more successful than Ax's organ excursion has been his journey into the world of performance practice. In two Sony Classical releases in late 1990s, Ax performed Chopin's Piano Concertos on a Chopin-era Erard piano.
The project generated ample critical acclaim, though not everyone loved it, including some of Ax's friends and colleagues. "Some thought that it was really not such a good thing to do, but I don't really know why," he says. "I don't think they had any good reasons for it. It was just sort of the thing to say."
Hearing historical practice proponent Roger Norrington first introduced Ax to the movement. "I was completely bowled over about 12 years ago when I heard Norrington conduct the Boston Symphony for the first time," he says. "It was the Beethoven Second Symphony. I was bowled over by the immediacy, the spunkiness and the raw energy of the performance."
Since its inception, the early music movement has concerned some that traditional ways of performing would be lost. But Ax scoffs at such notions. "The thing that is most significant to me is that we are beginning to see, with artists like Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, there is no way to encompass that music in one kind of performance," he says. "You can't say that Roger Norrington has now made obsolete the performances of Furtwangler, or that Klemperer at one point made obsolete the performances of Toscanini. All of these performances expose a different side of the music's genius."
In addition, the branching out has helped Ax be more creative when sitting back in front of a Steinway -- still his primary vehicle for performance. "What will happen playing on the Erard will also influence the way you go back to the Steinway," he says. "The important thing is to produce a vital and exciting performance, not what practice you follow." That philosophy came through in Ax's concert, on a grand piano, with the PSO last spring. He performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, occasionally playing high and buoyantly on the keys in a way that simulated the lighter timbre of the keyboards Beethoven used. It was an artful enhancement brought about by Ax's own continual investigations outside of the norm.
"I am excited by the fact that, thank God, in music you can still get better when you are in your 50s, and there are not many professions that's true," he says. "I am working very hard and am trying to rethink stuff all the time, and see if I can improve things."
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WITH: Mariss Jansons, conductor; Emanuel Ax, piano; Thomas Murray, organ