By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

The New York Times

28 April 2016

Describing a pianist’s performance as unhinged might seem like an unlikely compliment. But the adjective could be applied in the most flattering terms to Emanuel Ax’s engrossing interpretation of Beethoven’s “Pathétique”Sonata on Wednesday evening at Carnegie Hall.

The sonata was included on an all-Beethoven lineup, with two popular sonatas bookending three lesser-known pieces. Mr. Ax brought demonic power to the “Pathétique,” which opened the program. In the opening section, he revealed with particularly vivid colors the contrast between crashing low chords and the yearning melody in the upper register. His clarity of line was admirable in the tumultuous thickets of the first movement; the ethereal Adagio unfolded with a gorgeous simplicity; and he imbued the third-movement Rondo with seething tension.

After the tumult of the “Pathétique,” Mr. Ax offered a lighthearted contrast, a delightful and delicately shaded interpretation of the Six Variations on an Original Theme in F (Op. 34). Beethoven wrote the “Pathétique” during what historians have recognized as his early period, when he was already challenging the precedent of Viennese Classicism established by composers like Mozart and Haydn. He continued to break new ground in his middle period, when he composed the “Appassionata” Sonata. Mr. Ax brought passion and power in admirable measure to his performance, which concluded the program on a stormy note.

Beethoven’s Sonata No. 16 in G is perhaps the least often programmed work of his Opus 31 set, which includes the famous “Tempest” Sonata. It received an insightful and elegant performance here. Mr. Ax played the runs in the first movement with sparkling energy; the trills of the Adagio unfolded with leisurely grace, and the concluding Rondo with both strength and charm.

The second half of the program included an unfamiliar short bonbon: thePolonaise in C (Op. 89), which Beethoven wrote in 1814 for festivities at theCongress of Vienna and dedicated to a visiting czarina. After all the dramatic Beethovenian moods, Mr. Ax offered a gentle encore: an introverted rendition of Schubert’s “Der Müller und der Bach,” in Liszt’s transcription.

By Zachary Lewis

Cleveland.com

3 October 2016

By Elaine Schmidt

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

23 September 2016

Friday’s Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concert was a feast of soulful music making.

The orchestra, playing under the baton of Music Director Edo de Waart, opened the morning’s program with a feisty, character-filled performance of Richard Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.”

De Waart and the orchestra gave Strauss’ programmatic piece a vivid, completely engaging, performance. From principal horn player Matthew Annin’s ringing horn lines to some beautifully executed, turn-on-a-dime shifts in character over the course of the piece, their performance was a highly evocative experience — a bit like hearing a film score and getting to imagine the scenes it should accompany.

Soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen, who appeared the MSO’s “The Marriage of Figaro” performances last weekend, took the stage with a deeply stirring, beautifully crafted performance of Strauss’ “Four Last Songs.”

Willis-Sørensen mixed a warm, flexible sound with nimble, easy technical work, and fluid, expressive musical deliveries, supported beautifully by de Waart and the orchestra.

Pianist Emanuel Ax, who filled the program’s second half with Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2, apparently is built to play Brahms. From a gentle singing sound to declamatory, sometimes almost defiant musical statements, his was a performance filled with expressive intent and nuance, and tremendous musical character.

Part of the joy of hearing Ax’s performance was watching him listen to and interact with de Waart and the orchestra. He nodded and moved to their music when he wasn’t playing, trading ideas and statements with them when he was.

MSO principal cellist Susan Babini gave an exquisite performance of the long, lyrical cello lines that are featured in the piece’s third movement.

When Ax returned to the stage to answer a standing ovation, he brought along a piece of music. He motioned for Babini to come forward, and the two offered an achingly beautiful rendition of the third movement of Chopin’s Cello Sonata.

Both players moved gracefully from melody to accompaniment and back again throughout the sonata, picking up each other’s musical ideas like old friends finishing each other’s sentences, and giving a moving performance one hated to see come to an end.

By David Fleshler

South Florida Classical Review

16 October 2016

Sixty-five years after his death, Arnold Schoenberg can still be a tough sell for concert audiences.

At the season-opening concert of the New World Symphony Saturday in Miami Beach, the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and pianist Emanuel Ax did their best to prepare the audience for a performance of the composer’s Piano Concerto. Speaking from the New World Center stage, they discussed the work’s themes, demonstrated a few passages and tried to show how the music could be experienced in the same spirit as a concerto by Brahms or Tchaikovsky.

They did not understate the difficulty of grappling with the music of a man whose twelve-tone system of composition attempted to overturn the existing order in music and drove many audience members from the concert hall. “The piece you’re about to hear is definitely one of the most difficult and challenging things there is for all the people in the room,” Tilson Thomas said.

Ax, long an advocate for the concerto, which he recorded with Esa-Pekka Salonen, played in a soft-edged manner—except when the drama of the music required a harder touch. From the lyric opening, his sensual, non-percussive approach to the work fit it into the romantic piano tradition which preceded it, while capturing the concerto’s unique and unearthly mood.

In this performance, Schoenberg’s strange harmonies, often so harsh to the ear, didn’t exactly fade away. But they were accompanied by an emphasis on the textures, the drama, the sweeping sense of theater with which the performers built to the work’s climaxes. There were glints of the late 19th century in the glowing wind harmonies, and in the work’s rhythmic drive. Dissonances came off as eerie and melancholy, rather than grating, except in the brassy climaxes, where they contributed to these passages’ craggy power.

No pre-performance sales job was required for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14. Ax, giving an ironman demonstration of stamina in an evening of two concertos, played in a light, articulated manner, with a sense of the long sweep of Mozart’s melodic passage work. In the second movement, against a glowing accompaniment from the orchestra, he brought an almost Chopinesque sense of wistfulness and dreaminess to the long, yearning melodies. In the last movement, his spiky, angular playing gave contrapuntal passages just enough bite, while remaining within Mozartean proportions, with a fine sense of tension in the dark passage leading up to a restatement of the main theme.

The concert opened with Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, which Tilson Thomas described as “one of my most favorite pieces.”

With many of the greatest theme-and-variations works, the composer seems to draw a contrast between the drab or trivial theme on which the work is based and the complex and imaginative variations that follow. The theme here, which musicologists say wasn’t actually composed by Haydn, isn’t drab or trivial, but the orchestra played in a subdued and formal manner that left lots of room for the performance to develop in musical power.

The variations built magnificently, with brilliant individual passages that felt part of a larger whole. Particularly strong were the minor-key variations. Tilson Thomas drew maximum tension from one in which winds and strings engage in a pensive counterpoint, and another, a quiet, rustling passage that created the darkness from which the build-up to the sunlit finale could begin. The finale, however, felt underpowered. It’s a clanging, blaring statement, with the ping of a triangle on top, and it didn’t feel like the weighted, joyous musical payoff that it could be.

The concert ended with Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, a virtuoso work that the New World musicians tackled with gusto. Textures were transparent, with horns played in a spirited and immaculate manner. There was a touch of grotesqueness to the swooping melodies, appropriate to this medieval tale of blasphemy, irreverence and death. Playing the E-flat clarinet, which represents the doomed jokester Till Eulenspiegel, Ran Kampel brought out the humor, humanity and final desperation of the character as he faces execution.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/entertainment/2016/09/09/cso-emanuel-ax-electrify-season-opener-taft/89975540/

Last week of August NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” cast & crew along with their host PETER SAGAL were recording at Tanglewood — the outdoor music venue in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts — and they thought it would be a good time to talk with classical pianist Emanuel Ax, who has won seven Grammy awards and recorded with the world’s greatest orchestras.

They’ve invited Mr. Ax to play a game called “You make men irresistible to women!” Three questions about Axe body spray.

Listen to the entire segment & see the transcript here