Emanuel Ax plays Beethoven

Although it was almost 20 years ago I can still remember the precise moment I fell in love with Beethoven. I don't mean when I started to like Beethoven- I mean when his music became something of an obsession with me. At the time I was living in an apartment above the post office in La Honda (pop. 500), working at an Italian restaurant near the Stanford campus, and taking a survey course on Western music appreciation at a community college. The class had progressed through Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart and though I had taken to playing The Four Seasons in my car at a volume level usually reserved for Social Distortion, I hadn't yet experienced that moment where it all made intuitive sense to me. An upcoming assignment was Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3, so after checking my Penguin Guide for some recommendations I picked up a copy of Emanuel Ax performing the 3rd and 4th, with Andre Previn conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RCA), at a local store.

It must have been after dinner when I put the CD in the player because I remember it was already dark outside. I was alone, so I turned the volume up pretty high and sat down on the couch. The disc came with no liner notes so I was just sitting there listening to what sounded pretty good Mozart on steroids for about three minutes when orchestra heaved three times and fell silent. What came next I could only relate to as a monster riff. It was like hearing "Smoke On the Water" or "Whole Lotta Love" for the first time. Though the orchestra had just played pretty much the same theme, hearing it coming from the piano was a revelation. The thought "now that's rock and roll" popped into my head, and my obsession began. By the way, I found the rest of the disc to as compelling, and once I heard the 4th Concerto I wondered why we were studying the 3rd, since the 4th was so obviously superior (I still think of it as being one of Beethoven's very finest compositions- certainly it's the best of the piano concertos).

So needless to say I've always had a soft spot for that particular recording, though until this week I had never seen Ax perform in concert. But now here he was, in town to perform the 3rd with the San Francisco Symphony. I had been quietly looking forward to this concert for weeks.

It began with Mahler's Blumine, which received a gorgeous performance less than a year and a half ago but I welcomed the opportunity to hear it again. It offers Principal Trumpet Mark Inoyue an outstanding showcase of which he took complete advantage to show off his formidable skills with a series of elegantly elongated notes that melted into one's ears. Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik was equally impressive.

While the piano was being raised to the stage I tried to eavesdrop on what the two ladies seated next to us were saying to composer Samuel Carl Adams, who sitting alone in front of them, but I couldn't make any of out as I was also paying attention to Margarita's narrative about an upcoming adventure she has planned. I found it intriguing to see Adams here, and wondered if there was one particular piece that drew him to this program.

Ax's performance was everything I had hoped for, and even taking my sentimental bias out the picture, he and the orchestra were marvelous. I noted in a post at the beginning of this year how foolish I had been to choose not to attend many of the concerts featuring the standard rep in recent years, and here was another reminder of how good this orchestra is with the basics. MTT and Ax were in perfect sync with each other, taking the 3rd at a robust tempo in the first movement, amplifying the early heroic tone of the work, noticeably bringing out textures which make it seem hard to fathom this is 200 years old because it sounds so thoroughly contemporary in many aspects. As Ax soloed through the first movement I thought that someone hearing this for the first time in 1804 must have felt the same way people did when they heard Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" in 1978- "well, no one's done that before," since Beethoven was incorporating new design elements for the piano into a composition for the first time. And even if one isn't susceptible to the pyrotechnics, Ax was still remarkably on target with it, never showy, but very precise and noticeably engaged with his fellow musicians at every moment. They kept it up all the way through, and Ax received one of the most deserved standing ovations I've witnessed in some time. He returned for an encore- Schumann's "Des Abends," which only left me wishing there was more.

The second half of the concert looked quite odd on paper but turned out to be something I would like to see a lot more of in the future. MTT explained he modeled this half of the program based on his experiences at USC attending the salons of Jascha Heifetz, where short pieces would merit the same attention and level of dedicated performance as would normally be found for longer works. Copland's music for the film version of "Our Town" was first, and though the program stated it was about nine minutes long it felt like twenty for some reason, though that's not to say I didn't enjoy it the first half of it before I felt like we were driving around it in circles. Shorter gems from Debussy, Delius, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff and Delibes followed, and it worked quite well. More, please.

As we were leaving the concert I learned Ax was signing CDs in the lobby, so I did something I never do and stood in line to thank him personally. He was quite gracious about it, which only made me like him that much more.