\u201cA young pianist with the hard-to-forget name of Emanuel Ax has one thing going for him before he plays a note,\u201d the New York Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1973. \u201cBut brand identification, as advertising men term it, helps in the long run only if the product delivers, and Mr. Ax\u2019s recital at Alice Tully Hall on Monday night fortunately carried the stamp of quality.\u201d<\/p>\n
The occasion was Ax\u2019s New York debut, and it was the opening flourish of a banner few years. At the Marlboro Festival in Vermont that summer, Ax gave his first concert with Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist he has spent his career playing and quipping with, the friend who calls him \u201cthe big brother I never had.\u201d Soon, there was a date on the Young Concert Artists series, a Carnegie Hall appearance, a victory in the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and, in February 1975, an eloquent first recording.<\/p>\n
That stamp of quality had become indelible, and it has since endured. Of course, Ax, 74, protests that the half-century career he has enjoyed following that inaugural hometown bow has been largely the product of good fortune. Never mind his Avery Fisher Prize or his 19 Grammy nominations (and eight wins), his long list of premieres or his generosity and ease as a chamber music partner to Ma and other eager collaborators. Even now, Ax will only reluctantly allow that he has much talent at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just started, and I stuck to it; I liked it,\u201d Ax said of playing the piano during a recent interview at Tanglewood, where he was joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a Brahms concerto as he has many, many times before. \u201cI think the sheer enjoyment of it is a talent in itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s Manny, as everyone calls him. He has said things like this forever, sought to share the spotlight or point it wholly elsewhere. And his modesty, which he wraps in a jesting smile and a famous bonhomie, is at the heart of his pianism and personality alike.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever his musical decisions are, they are never ones that would draw attention to himself,\u201d said the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has known Ax for four decades and will premiere a piano concerto by Anders Hillborg with him and the San Francisco Symphony in October. \u201cSo in the very, very best sense of the word, he kind of eradicates himself out of the picture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Might that mean, though, that Ax is taken for granted? After all, how many artists have performed at his level for so long? How many have treated us so reliably to such taste and good sense as he? How many have had his ability, not unlike that of his late associate Bernard Haitink, to make music sound so simply right?<\/p>\n
Ax ranks among the very finest of American pianists. Yet he would never admit it. As Ma put it, \u201cHe doesn\u2019t go around saying, \u2018And I did this.\u2019\u201d In fact, Ma recalled, when Ax told him that this article was happening, he said, \u201cI don\u2019t know why they\u2019re doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI told him it\u2019s because he\u2019s old,\u201d Ma said, bursting into laughter.<\/p>\n
Ma \u2014 who, aside from the pianist Yoko Nozaki, Ax\u2019s wife since 1974, has probably heard him play more than anyone \u2014 has a theory about why Ax is the way he is. \u201cOne thing that I can safely say, over the 50 years I\u2019ve known him, is that he operates by a very strict code of conduct,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The code, Ma went on, means that Ax never speaks ill of other pianists, and does what he can to bolster them instead. He insists on being kind, on looking at the brighter side of things. He goes to unusual lengths to build trust with fellow performers because the music, in the end, depends on it.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomewhere along the line, he saw some things that he didn\u2019t like, and he decided that he was not going to be that,\u201d Ma explained. \u201cHe\u2019s seen the consequences, and that\u2019s why the code of conduct exists. It\u2019s not some arbitrary thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
AX WAS BORN<\/strong> in the Soviet Union in 1949, in what is now Lviv, Ukraine \u2014 though he still calls it Lw\u00f3w, the Polish name it held in the interwar years. During the Holocaust, his parents, Joachim and Hellen, survived the concentration camps but lost, he said, \u201ceverybody.\u201d They wed after the war and left for Warsaw when Ax was 7. He didn\u2019t return to Lviv until six years ago, when he visited at the invitation of Philippe Sands, whose book \u201cEast West Street\u201d movingly recounts the history of that contested city.<\/p>\n Ax said that he only really remembered the opera house where he had first heard music, but Ma has heard him talk about a darker recollection, too: \u201cI think he remembers a big parade in the town, and he knew the exact spot where it was. He backtracked and realized that that must have been when Stalin had died.\u201d<\/p>\n Warsaw led to Winnipeg, and Winnipeg to Manhattan, where the family settled into an apartment on the roof of a building across the street from Carnegie Hall. Ax was 12, and the hall, where he will play works by Beethoven and Schoenberg in April, became his playground. \u201cI haunted the place,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Great pianists crossed his path, older ones like Artur Rubinstein and younger artists such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, and he speaks of them with the excitement of a fan and the insight of a colleague. For Emil Gilels, he reserves telling enthusiasm.<\/p>\n \u201cI think he\u2019s in a way the most sane pianist,\u201d Ax said. \u201cIt\u2019s so direct, absolutely self-confident, unarrogant, logical, beautiful, and just done just right. You walk out and you say, \u2018That\u2019s the way it should be.\u2019 Of course, then you hear Richter, and you say, \u2018No, that\u2019s the way it should be.\u2019 And then you hear Horowitz.\u201d<\/p>\n Ax studied at Juilliard with Mieczyslaw Munz, and endured several competitions before he triumphed in the Rubinstein. Even then, his virtues were not those typical of winners. For all his \u201cdream technique,\u201d as a critic described it in 1975, he immediately seemed a deeper musician than most. \u201cHis interpretations are warm, solid and straightforward,\u201d Tim Page wrote in The Times in 1985, styling him as \u201ca deeply satisfying pianist\u201d \u2014 traits you can hear on his recording of the Chopin \u201cBallades\u201d from the same year, or his later Haydn and Brahms.<\/p>\n If consistency has been Ax\u2019s hallmark, he has never been entirely reducible to type. He dabbled with period instruments for a while, joining Charles Mackerras and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to record the Chopin concertos with brilliance and verve; his dedication to new music, which has seen him premiere scores by composers including John Adams and Missy Mazzoli, has been striking for a pianist of his stature.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think he sees it as a duty,\u201d Salonen said of Ax\u2019s commitment to contemporary works. \u201cI think he thinks it\u2019s normal. He thinks this is something that musicians do.\u201d<\/p>\n Chamber music, though, was with Ax from the start. He studied with the legendary tutor Felix Galimir as a teenager, then went on to form, among other groups, his duo with Ma, a piano trio with Ma and Isaac Stern, a piano quartet with the addition of Jaime Laredo, and, most recently, another trio with Ma and Leonidas Kavakos, with whom he is working his way through arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies.<\/p>\n Ax\u2019s fundamental approach to chamber music reflects his \u201cdevotion to where he landed, and to the aspirations of the system,\u201d Ma said, to \u201cthe idea of republicanism, that you can be not hierarchical.\u201d Their relationship was forged on jokes told in the Juilliard cafeteria, where they met when Ma was 15 and Ax was 21, but also on an ideal of equality in shared music, Ma said; this, at a time when pianists were still billed as accompanists to stars, or spoken of in the possessive sense.<\/p>\n And it is chamber music, or more precisely playing with friends, that keeps Ax from retiring. He thinks about it more than he used to, he said; he missed giving concerts during the pandemic, but he also felt liberated from the deep anxiety that has always come with them.<\/p>\n \u201cI get very nervous when I play, and I really wish I could get over it,\u201d Ax said, confiding that the feeling can be worse now than before. \u201cIt\u2019s not even a musical worry, it\u2019s more about getting things right, you know \u2014 wrong notes and things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n Ax is modest even about these strains; Ma compared the pressure that Ax has always felt to that suffered by Martha Argerich, whose stage fright and perfectionism have led her largely to abandon solo recitals. But he suspects that Ax is not there yet.<\/p>\n \u201cSomething in me tells me that he\u2019s not going to stop, because performing also does something for him that is a pillar in his life,\u201d Ma said. \u201cIt\u2019s solidifying. I wouldn\u2019t say that it\u2019s like he needs it, but there\u2019s a mutuality that\u2019s good.\u201d<\/p>\n Ask Ma what makes Ax special as a pianist, and he will say that it is how he gives music the sense that everything has been thought through. He will note how revealing it is that Ax so adores Brahms, whose works are all about restraint, about reaching for things that are kept out of reach. He will marvel, with more than a hint of exasperation, that Ax still practices for four hours a day, that he is still so prone to doubt; he will grant, though, that doubt serves a purpose in Ax\u2019s life.<\/p>\n