Emanuel Ax, piano
Location: Shriver Hall
The consummate pianist Emanuel Ax brings a lifetime of authority to every musical setting—whether as a soloist with the world’s leading orchestras, chamber musician, Grammy-winning recording artist, or recitalist. With “bountiful imagination, delicacy when called for and thundering power” (The New York Times) he returns to Shriver Hall performing essential repertoire including Schumann's powerful Fantasie in C major.
“Mr. Ax plays with youthful brio, incisive rhythm, bountiful imagination, delicacy when called for, and thundering power” —The New York Times
What You'll Hear
About the sponsor
Zarelda Fambrough, known as "Zee" to all, is remembered as a quietly enthusiastic and caring person, known for her support of the arts, for her love of nature (for many years she chaired of the Science Department at St. Paul's School for Girls), and for her work with adult literacy. She and her husband, Dr. Douglas Fambrough, a retired Professor of Biology at The Johns Hopkins University and amateur pianist, supported Shriver Hall Concert Series for decades, with Doug serving on the Board of Directors from 1986 to 2010. Doug and Zee endowed this annual concert in 2000 with the hope of inspiring others to support SHCS through major donations and planned gifts; Doug dedicated it to Zee's memory in 2017.
Emanuel Ax
Born to Polish parents in what is today Lviv, Ukraine, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. Mr. Ax made his New York debut in the Young Concert Artists Series, and in 1974 won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975 he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize.
The 2024-25 season begins with a continuation of the Beethoven For Three touring and recording project with partners Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma which takes them to European festivals including BBC Proms, Dresden, Hamburg, Vienna and Luxembourg. As guest soloist he will appear during the New York Philharmonic’s opening week which will mark his 47th annual visit to the orchestra. During the season he will return to the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, National, San Diego, Nashville and Pittsburgh symphonies and Rochester Philharmonic. A fall recital tour from Toronto and Boston moves west to include San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles culminating in the spring in Chicago and his annual Carnegie Hall appearance. A special project in duo with clarinetist Anthony McGill takes them from the west coast through the mid-west to Georgia and Carnegie Hall and in chamber music with Itzhak Perlman and Friends to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Francisco. An extensive European tour will include concerts in Paris, Oslo, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Warsaw and Israel.
Mr. Ax has been a Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987 and following the success of the Brahms Trios with Kavakos and Ma, the trio launched an ambitious, multi-year project to record all the Beethoven Trios and Symphonies arranged for trio of which the first three discs have been released. He has received GRAMMY® Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s piano sonatas. He has also made a series of GRAMMY-winning recordings with Yo-Yo Ma of the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. In the 2004-05 season Mr. Ax contributed to an International EMMY® Award-Winning BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In 2013, Mr. Ax’s recording Variations received the Echo Klassik Award for Solo Recording of the Year (19th Century Music/Piano).
Mr. Ax is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates of music from Skidmore College, New England Conservatory of Music, Yale University, and Columbia University. For more information about Mr. Ax’s career, please visit EmanuelAx.com.
“Ax’s plush tone and intense focus creates the sensation of floating in air and yet being somehow rooted to the earth. Time feels as though it stood still and yet the piece seemed to be over in an instant. I can explain none of this. The experience was exceptional.” —The Los Angeles Times
Program to include:
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Sonata to be announced
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
Mélancolie
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Estampes
- I. Pagodes
- II. La soirée dans Grenade
- III. Jardins sous la pluie
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
L'isle joyeuse
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Fantasie in C major, Op. 17
View NotesIn the seven years before his marriage to Clara Wieck in 1840, Schumann wrote some of his greatest piano works, including the first and second Sonatas, Kreisleriana, Scenes from Childhood, and the Fantasie in C major. Schumann was infatuated with the budding pianist and composer, ten years his junior; her father’s implacable opposition to the match had the predictable result of driving them into each other’s arms. The lines by the echt-Romantic philosopher and poet Friedrich Schlegel that Schumann attached to the Fantasie as an epigraph were clearly meant for Clara’s eyes: “Through all the tones in Earth’s many-colored dream, a quietly drawn-out tone sounds for one who listens secretly.”
The germ of the Fantasie consisted of a single movement titled “Ruins,” which Schumann later expanded into a memorial triptych to Beethoven with the addition of panels labeled “Trophies” and “Palms.” By early 1838, he had reverted to his original conception, telling Clara that “the first movement is probably the most passionate I have ever written—a deep lamentation for you.” Like many of Schumann’s works, the Fantasie plays on the contrasting temperaments of his fictitious literary alter egos, the stormy, impulsive Florestan and the dreamy, ruminative Eusebius. Florestan takes center stage at the outset, as a broad, majestic melody soars above rippling sixteenth notes. But the gentle spirit of Eusebius dominates the first movement’s prayer-like middle section and the tender Adagio at the end, in which Schumann quotes a poignant snatch of melody from the song cycle Beethoven wrote to his own “distant beloved.” The second movement is a crisply energetic march pulsing with rhythmic vitality, while the finale owes its mood of reverie to Schumann’s searching harmonies and his characteristic technique of embedding the melody in a rich skein of figuration.
© Harry Haskell, 2022
