For over 40 years, Emmanuel Ax has appeared on every important concert stage in the world in concertos, chamber music, and solo recitals. On Thursday night he treated a responsive Groton Hill Performance Center audience to a very satisfying recital. I continue to marvel the at stunningly beautiful and l acoustically wonderful space set so gorgeously in an old apple orchard.

Ax has been at this game long enough to know how to combine works that cohere convincingly in a stated theme. His concert of fantasies opened with the great Beethoven Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, Quasi una fantasia. From the first notes, Ax made known his amazing control of tone and color. The opening pianissimo journeyed with us to a placid place with a marvelous balance between registers.  Ax really knows how to take his time, choosing a slower tempo than most for the Allegro molto e vivace, conveying a lightness of feeling that really worked. The Adagio found its rightfully deep and moving place as the heart of this sonata.

Ax spoke charmingly and about Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstucke, Opus 11, as if the audience needed some coaxing to accept it. I experienced Sturm und Drang, with loud bass punctuation, followed by skittering small monsters followed the diaphanous veils. Florence Mahomes wrote that, “The three pieces are given a unity of atonal musical space through the projection of material from the first piece into the other two, including recurring use of motivic material. The first of the three motivic cells of the first piece is used throughout the second, and the first and third cells are found in the third.” I need to hear the 15-minute set again, but it certainly took on elements of fantasy.

Beethoven also dubbed his Moonlight Sonata (No. 14 in C-sharp Minor) as a Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia; both it and the E-flat Major we heard earlier show his experimentation with sonata form. The first movement seemingly floated in suspended sound. Ax gave something of a master class in elucidating the triplet figures in the left hand, the occasional dotted eighth and sixteenth notes in the right hand; that made a huge impression. Again, a master took his time. He waited and waited for the notes to decay before he began the second movement. He also played the last two chords as if they were appogiaturas, with the first chord slightly louder than the second. It worked so well! That way the second movement served as a delectable pallet cleanser. And then we are off to the races in the last movement.

Of his Six Little Piano Pieces, Op.19, Schoenberg wrote:

My goal: complete liberation from form and symbols, cohesion and logic. Away with motivic work! Away with harmony as the cement of my architecture! Harmony is expression and nothing more. Away with pathos! Away with 24 pound protracted scores! My music must be short. Lean! In two notes, not built, but “expressed”. And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment. That is not how man feels; it is impossible to feel only one emotion. Man has many feelings, thousands at a time, and these feelings add up no more than apples and pears add up. Each goes its own way. This multicoloured, polymorphic, illogical nature of our feelings, and their associations, a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves; I must have this in my music. It should be an expression of feeling, as if really were the feeling, full of unconscious connections, not some perception of “conscious logic”. Now I have said it, and they may burn me.

In five minutes this epigrams passed by as if in a trance

I felt like I had waited all evening for the full-throated romanticism of Schumann’s Fantasie in C Major, OP. 17. In the Durchaus fantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen; Im Legenden-Ton (Quite fantastic and passionately delivered; In the tone of a legend), Ax’s every rubato and pause took our breath away with fantastic freedom. The Mäßig. Durchaus energisch made an immediate contrast with its great chordal opening and expansive feelings. And we meditated with Schumann at his most tender in the Langsam getragen. Durchweg leise zu halten. Ax found a special place of great poignancy, overwhelming us with his mastery.

Ax encored with the Chopin Waltz in A Minor Op. 34, No. 2. When its hauntingly beautiful opening theme returns at the end, you knew that Ax had said all he wanted to say.

He repeated the concert on Sunday at Jordan Hall for the Celebrity Series. Reviewed HERE

Colleen Katsuki is a freelance accompanist who also maintains a private piano studio in her home in Lincoln.