John Williams’s Piano Concerto Review: From Hollywood to Tanglewood

The Wall Street Journal

The celebrated film composer’s new work, which had its premiere at the idyllic Massachusetts venue this weekend in a performance by Emanuel Ax and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, deftly highlights his artistry away from the silver screen.

Composers of film scores who aspire to the concert hall have it rough. Fans from the multiplex want tunes they can hum, while classical-music aficionados tend to regard composers who earn studio paychecks as inferior to those who don’t. Yet such snobbery is not entirely misplaced, as several Hollywood composers have made ill-fated attempts to augment their mainstream success with the patina of “serious” music.

The obvious exception is John Williams, arguably the greatest and certainly the most commercially successful composer of music for movies ever. In addition to his Hollywood triumphs with Steven Spielberg and others, Mr. Williams has proved a hit in the concert hall. His works for violin and orchestra have been composed for world-class artists like Anne-Sophie Mutter and Gil Shaham, and his Cello Concerto was written for Yo-Yo Ma.

On Saturday, Mr. Williams notched another such achievement: the premiere of his Piano Concerto, dedicated to Emanuel Ax, a soloist equally renowned for interpretive sympathy and technical acumen. As with the violin and cello works, the first performance was given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, ensconced as usual this time of year at Tanglewood, its summer home since 1937. The conductor was the orchestra’s music director, Andris Nelsons, who just completed his 11th season in the job. Mr. Williams is no stranger to this prestigious al fresco festival; he conducted the Boston Pops here from 1980 to 1993, succeeding the legendary Arthur Fiedler in that role. And he remains a beloved presence on this vast and verdant campus, as the overwhelming audience reaction to his appearance on stage Saturday attested.

Mr. Williams’s new 21-minute concerto—which will enjoy a run of four performances in Boston with the same forces in January—does not have a catchy title like “TreeSong,” the violin concerto in all but name he wrote for Mr. Shaham in 2000. But the program indicates that the work’s three discrete movements are nods to the great jazz pianists Art Tatum, Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson. The composer, whose father was a jazz drummer, is a pianist himself, so he comes by such connections honestly. Yet the jazz aspects of the piece are not especially obvious.

Instead, I felt the concerto, scored for a large and colorful orchestra and featuring novel couplings, had a strong universal narrative that moved from near desolation to triumph, with several diverting episodes in between. It opens boldly, for the piano alone, with no time signatures, so Mr. Ax, now age 76, played freely. That changed once the orchestra entered and the perennial struggle of group versus individual unfolded—though in later passages some members of the orchestra were briefly afforded similar liberties.

The work has many appealing aspects, not least that it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Understandably for a man well into his tenth decade, Mr. Williams wishes to get straight to the point. Modernists like Charles Ives and Alban Berg are clearly invoked but never oppressively, while some rhythms in the finale struck me as straight from Dvořák’s playbook.

But the concerto’s high point must be the opening of the second movement, in which a solo viola (BSO principal Steven Ansell on this occasion) spins a lachrymose melody that is soon joined by the questing solo piano. Once entwined, the music quickly becomes a love duet, which then gradually expands as other instruments enter. The end of the third movement will also have its fans, especially those who cherish Mr. Williams’s film work, for it is a hell-for-leather orchestral coda in the mode of Beethoven that rises in intensity until a thwack from the bass drum tells us we’re done—as if we didn’t know!

Mr. Ax, typically, made the whole affair seem natural, even as some of what he was asked to do would daunt a much younger player. And Mr. Nelsons and the orchestra, sounding splendid throughout, offered that rarest of gifts—the ability to arrest a listener’s attention without at all detracting from the soloist’s efforts.

The evening offered no curtain raiser, but the concerto was followed, post-intermission, by a riveting account of Mahler’s lately ubiquitous Symphony No. 1. Paradoxically, the performance, except in climaxes, exuded languor. Yet by emphasizing cohesion as much as atmosphere, Mr. Nelsons held the melodic line so tautly that focus never flagged. And only an orchestra as fine as this one could have produced the elegant sonic glow he elicited.

Mr. Williams’s contributions to Hollywood will long survive him. Whether his classical scores have that sort of staying power is unclear. But the best of them, including this latest work—which Mr. Ax and the New York Philharmonic will perform in late February and early March—possess a broad appeal that any music lover can embrace.

Ax finds form in fantasy in Carnegie recital

New York Classical Review
One might have known an evening of fantasy with Emanuel Ax was not going to be a random walk.

The pianist, known for compelling, straight-no-chaser performances of keyboard classics, played five pieces Thursday night in Carnegie Hall, four of which had some form of “fantasy” in the title. But there was no relaxation of his standards when it came to finding and communicating the entire shape of a piece.

The two sonatas that Beethoven labeled “quasi una fantasia” and published together as his Op. 27 had plenty of structure, just not the particular sequence of movements that had become a convention by 1801, when he composed them. Hearing both on the same program was like meeting two siblings with a family resemblance but contrasting personalities: the E-flat major gentle with a mischievous streak, the C-sharp minor (“Moonlight”) dark and brooding with a violent temper. Composed in the first year of a new century, one looked back to an age of good manners, the other ahead to an era of Romantic subjectivity and turmoil.

The pianist played the tidy opening of the E-flat Sonata with a touch of freedom, as if he were making it up as he went along. The spirit of fantasy continued with a sudden bright idea, Presto, in a whole different key, C major. A sense of flow within and between these sections carried the listener along. The same was true of the following movements, played without a break as the composer instructed: a scherzo surging in smooth waves, a rich-toned aria for a baritone over a steady adagio pulse, and a rambunctious rondo that paused to remember the baritone’s song before racing to the finish.

Instead of simply playing the two sonatas back to back, Ax cannily inserted between them a meditation on Beethoven by John Corigliano, Fantasia on an Ostinato. Composing a test piece for contestants in the 1985 Van Cliburn Competition, Corigliano began with a repeating rhythm (ostinato) from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, then emphasized imagination over digital virtuosity by supplying the players with a sort of Lego box of “interlocking repeated patterns” and inviting them to improvise with it.

The piece has lived on far beyond the competition, as a number of prominent pianists have taken up Corigliano’s challenge. Ax’s version on Thursday began and ended with echoes of Beethoven’s symphony, but spent most of the time exploring sonorities with hands overlapping in the middle of the keyboard, with only occasional excursions to upper and lower ranges, or into more forte dynamics. The effect was mesmerizing.

There was of course applause for Corigliano’s clever concept and Ax’s subtle pianism–and the composer, 87, rose at his seat to acknowledge it–but one wondered how it would have been to follow the piece’s pianissimo close immediately, quasi una fantasia, with Beethoven’s hushed “Moonlight” ripples.

Again Ax allowed himself just a touch of freedom in those slow triplets, a human presence amid the steady ostinato. The Adagio melody sang in tones like black pearls, and unfolded with the glacial dignity of a slowed-down Bach chorale. The pianist emphasized lightness and grace in the Allegretto, recalling Liszt’s description of it as “a flower between two abysses.”

The furious finale flowed, a cataract now instead of a moonlit lake, its chutes and jets and eddies artfully shaped by the pianist, at least until the rocks themselves came loose in the violent coda.

A different kind of liquid quality characterized Schumann’s Arabeske, Op. 18, as its little tune burbled out with slightly different inflections each time it returned. Ax made sure one heard that each of the minor-key episodes was based on a variant of that same theme. This outwardly trifling piece, which even the composer spoke of dismissively, actually had a lot going on.

One could say Schumann’s three-movement Fantasy in C major, Op. 17—with its dual inspiration of a love letter to Clara and a monument to Beethoven–was a fantasy “quasi una sonata,” especially the way Ax kept its ecstatic effusions and tender murmurs on an expressive track in the eager first movement. Ax allowed the hearty march movement to steal in quietly at first, but drove it to a triumphant conclusion.

Ax waited a long time for the march’s final chord to die away before embarking on this piece’s most fantasy-like movement, a meditation on longing for the distant beloved in which the composer seems lost in the woods, stopping and starting over in another key, remembering past happiness, hovering between despair and acceptance. Ax’s performance was alive to every nuance of feeling in this most Romantic of finales.

The pianist responded to the audience’s ovation with a single encore, Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s song “Ständchen,” delicately tracing its echo effects.

Emanuel Ax et Nathalie Stutzmann de l’intime aux grands espaces avec l’Orchestre de Paris

“Alors qu’Emmanuel Ax commence le Concerto pour piano n° 4 de Beethoven dans une nuance à la limite de l’audible depuis le cinquième rang du parterre de la Philharmonie de Paris, on se demande si les spectateurs du deuxième balcon peuvent apprécier avec autant d’acuité la beauté sonore que cisèle l’artiste depuis son clavier. Le Steinway est transformé en piano de cristal, d’où chaque note émane en toute transparence au gré de la variété d’attaques du soliste : qu’il s’agisse d’un détaché énergique ou d’une délicate liaison, toutes les notes résonnent dans l’oreille à leur juste place, tant au sein de la phrase que relativement à l’ensemble harmonique.”

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