At 75, with accolades galore, Emanuel Ax insists he’s ‘just a piano player’

Emanuel Ax could be called America’s “aw, shucks” pianist. When asked about the 50th anniversary of his New York debut two years ago and an accompanying major feature in the New York Times, he seemed puzzled by the whole thing. ‘

“I didn’t really understand why the Times did a story, to be honest,” Ax said. “I’m just a piano player, basically.”

But it’s impossible for anyone who has watched has career progress across that half-century to accept such a humble take, despite Ax’s reaction. To the contrary, Ax deserves to be ranked among the finest pianists this country has produced.

Ax, now 75, a regular visitor to Symphony Center, often joining the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or performing chamber music, will return April 27 for a solo recital as part of the Symphony Center Presents Piano series. It will be his first such presentation in the hall since a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

He will perform a program focused primarily on Beethoven and Schumann and the fantasia or fantasy, a kind of free-flowing musical form akin to an impromptu. The idea started with his desire to revisit Schumann’s Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17, the program’s culminating offering. 

“I wanted to have another go at the Schumann Fantasy,” he said. “I played it about 20 years ago and not very well, So I’m trying again. I may not play it very well this year, but I’m trying, because I adore that piece.”

Once he had one fantasy on the program, he decided to keep going. So he is performing two of Beethoven’s sonatas that happen to be fantasies: the Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, and Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2 (Moonlight).

This season marks the first time he has performed either of these two works in concert. Considering how famous the Moonlight Sonata is, Ax admits that it’s surprising he is just now getting around to taking it on.

Rounding out his focus on the fantasy is the Fantasia on an Ostinato by John Corigliano, who at 87 is one of the deans of the American compositional scene. Ax said he was especially impressed with Corigliano’s 1991 opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, and Symphony No. 1 (1988), a response to the AIDS epidemic and a work that the pianist described as a “searing experience.”

Corigliano was commissioned in 1985 by the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition to write a work for the 12 semi-finalists at the following year’s edition of the contest, and Fantasia on an Ostinato has become a favorite of pianists ever since. It is based on an ostinato, a repeated rhythmic pattern, from the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony

His love of chamber music comes from his teachers. “They instilled that in me. I love being with other musicians. I’m naturally a pretty gregarious person, and I love the idea of being with others onstage and off.” — Emanuel Ax

While the Fantasia begins and ends with the strict ostinato, the central section is what Corigliano describes in his accompanying note as a series of interlocking repeated patterns. “The performer decided the number, and to a certain extent, the character of these repetitions,” he wrote. “In other words, the shape was his/hers to build. Interestingly, the duration of this piece varied from seven minutes to over 20 in the Cliburn performances!”

Rounding out Ax’s SCP program is Schumann’s Arabeske in C Major, Op. 18. “It’s the odd man out,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s the exception that proves the rule.”

Perhaps not surprising, given Ax’s “aw, shucks” attitude, there is little that is glitzy, starry or trendy about his career, and he seems just fine with that. “It’s just part of your make-up, your psyche, really,” he said.

Part his of more down-to-earth image comes, he theorizes, from his choice of repertoire that has largely been devoid, for example, of the big, showy Russian works. “I never felt that I did Russian music very well,” he said. “I love it very deeply, but I’ve played almost none of it.” He has, for example, performed just two pieces by Rachmaninov — the composer’s Second Piano Concerto early in his career and Sonata in G Minor for Cello and Piano (1901).  

“The music I play is probably less barn-burning in that sense,” Ax said. “Also, I don’t really fit the image of a romantic hero, although I wish I did. But I think you make music in the way that you are as a person, I suppose.”

Ax has devoted much of his time to the less prominent world of chamber music, though he has had the benefit of a longtime collaboration with one of the classical-world’s most admired artists, cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

He called his meeting Ma and beginning what has become a 53-year musical relationship a kind of coup de foudre. “It’s a truly major, major part of my life in every way,” he said. “That was a piece of a luck. You meet the right person that you marry, and you meet someone like Yo-Yo.”

The pianist credits his love of chamber music to two of his teachers, violinists Felix Galimir and Lewis Kaplan. “They instilled that in me,” he said. “I love being with other musicians. I’m naturally a pretty gregarious person, and I love the idea of being with others onstage and off.”

As he has gotten older, Ax admits that he often has to practice more than he used to. “I feel like I have to re-practice everything over and over and over just to get it decent,” he said. “I don’t know the reasons for that, but I’m doing my best, let’s put it that way. And I’m trying to learn to forgive myself a little more, which is important.”

The pianist admits he does think about retiring from performing, something that pianist Alfred Brendel, for example, did when he was 77. “I don’t know what to say about it,” Ax said. “I really do know that I’m going to have to stop at some point, obviously. I just don’t know when. I have a feeling it’s going to be sooner rather than later.”

Such thoughts don’t upset him at all. “I’m ready,” Ax said. “I’m fine to do it. I’d love to keep playing for pleasure. What’s hard for me is that I still get very nervous when I play, and the nerves take their toll.”

All that said, the pianist acknowledges being pleased with the longevity of his career, and he is thrilled that he has had the chance to play with some “wonderful people” and to “have some wonderful memories.”

“That’s really it, to be honest,” said the “aw, shucks” pianist.