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[MUSIC REVIEW] Emanuel Ax at the Mahaiwe
11.4.07
Emanuel Ax
Solo Piano Recital
Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Review by Seth Rogovoy
(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., November 4, 2007) -- Is there a pianist in all the world more articulate and expressive than Emanuel Ax? Judging from his recital last night at the Mahaiwe, it’s hard to imagine. Ax’s well-thought-out program, sandwiching two free-form Romantic explorations by Robert Schumann in between two Beethoven sonatas, gave the master the chance to strut his virtuosity while interpreting these highly personal pieces before a sold-out crowd.
Ax began the evening with Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major, Op. 2, No. 2, opening with a light, playful, highly rhythmic theme that was almost like a child’s dance. Very soon Ax steered it into moody Beethoven territory, with angularities of tone and abrupt changes of mood. He spun elaborate passages and variations, each boasting a different tone and emotion, out of the same, sprightly descending figure.
The Largo portion provided some rhythmic relief, before Ax brought it all home with the scherzo and concluding rondo. The scherzo echoed the opening Allegro vivace in its playfulness and descending chromatic figure but lost its childishness, sounding grown up and more mature, more like a ballerina than a child’s romp. Ax was fully up to the challenge presented by Beethoven of requiring the pianist to ascend or descend at least one full octave per note of melody; Ax handled the task with deft confidence and agility.
Ax explained that Robert Schumann’s Humoreske in B-flat Major, Op. 20, was not a comic piece, but rather humor in the sense of differing moods. The twenty-five minute, almost free-form work jumped all over the place, almost like a freewheeling jazz improvisation, although it repeatedly found a place and stuck with it for a while—a mood, a rhythm, or a theme, and then re-emerged elsewhere. It was clear that Randy Newman has spent some time listening to Schumann based on the way he voiced his harmonies, and while Schumann’s melodies were for the most part concrete, there was more than a dab of impressionism peeking through the scrim of linearity.
Ax truly shone on this piece. Some pianist play the keys or make love to them. Ax played with such dynamic precision that if you closed your eyes you could sense how he could feel from the touch of the keys all the way through the piano’s mechanism to where the hammer strikes the string, so controlled, purposeful, and at times delicate was his approach.
After a brief intermission, Ax continued with Schumann’s Papillons, Op. 2, a portrait of a masquerade ball that swirled around like a movie camera on a boom and portrayed the partygoers in all their festiveness and complexity.
Ax brought the concert proper to a close with Beethoven’s Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53, commonly known as “Waldstein” after one of his early patrons. In its burst of urban energy, the opening could well have been a model for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, so vividly did the piece capture the sounds of the marketplace, street vendors hawking their wares, deals being made down alleyways and in cafes. “Waldstein” was much more thematic and painterly than the earlier sonata, more evocative of a time and place and situation, while making use of the same basic tools – Beethoven’s impossibly long, fast scales and arpeggios that led to the tonic notes that made up the melody.
The Largo section captured the city at nightfall, with traders retiring to their drawing rooms for a drink and a cigar, and the piece grew more stately and grand, more declarative and more delicately elaborated, before bursting forth with a majestic dawn of a new day.
Ax received numerous curtain calls and finally obliged the audience with a brief encore.
Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning music critic.
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