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The road is a second home to classical pianist Emanuel Ax
Emanuel Ax will perform with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
Courtesy Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
Mark Kanny can be reached via e-mail or at 412-320-7877.
He's been one of the most admired and successful classical musicians since winning the first Artur Rubinstein Competition at age 25.
"It's been tough," says the pianist, who gives 100 concerts a year. "But it's gotten easier because the family is big now."
His son, Joe, is a newspaper writer and his daughter, Sarah, is a sophomore in college. "Once in a while, if we're lucky, we hear from Sarah," is a familiar parental lament.
Now he's playing more often with his pianist wife, Yoko, and is looking forward to performing Bela Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion with her.
Unlike some concert artists who prepare a few pieces each season, Ax's schedule typically covers a wide span. His orchestral schedule this year includes the Piano Concerto No. 20, in D minor, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that he'll perform this weekend with conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi at Heinz Hall. And with other orchestras, he'll repeat Johannes Brahms' Second Piano Concerto and Christopher Rouse's "Seeing" that he's performed here in the past two seasons. In addition, he'll give the premieres of two pieces written for him: Bright Sheng's Concerto for Piano and Cello, which he'll introduce with Yo-Yo Ma and the New York Philharmonic, and Melinda Wagner's Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony.
And he'll keep his recital program of music by Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven and Leonard Bernstein fresh in his fingers, as well as prepare for a tour with the King's Singers that includes music by a 1920s Berlin vocal ensemble called The Comedian Harmonists, give recitals in the spring with clarinetist Richard Stolzman and perform with Ma at Tanglewood next summer.
One of the performer's most pressing needs is to find places to practice while on the road, although Ax was home last weekend. While pianists are dependent on the instruments they find in the places they perform, Ax doesn't keep a list of his favorites in each town. "The piano situation has gotten so much better," he says. "I line up places to practice in advance," usually in the halls where he'll perform.
When Ax performed Brahms' Second Piano Concerto here two years ago, he said its technical challenges were virtually sadistic. Yet the music of Mozart is famously difficult in other ways, particularly because of its transparency.
Ax says the concerto he'll play this weekend is "probably the closest he came to writing the opera 'Don Giovanni' without words. Aside from the difficulty of just playing the notes smoothly and accurately, there's the aspect of having a certain dynamic range in which things sound not only convincing but appropriate."
The D minor Concerto is "very dramatic, very dark, very personal and very explosive, yet the writing for piano necessitates that you not bang through it. The dynamic range is smaller than a Brahms or Prokofiev concerto, yet the drama is if anything bigger."
| Emanuel Ax |
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