Boston Classical Review

Of all the unexpected connections to emerge from Emanuel Ax’s recital at Jordan Hall on Sunday afternoon, perhaps the most surprising came from the pianist himself. Introducing Arnold Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke from the stage, he noted that in the music appreciation course the Austrian composer taught at UCLA, one year he counted among his students Jackie Robinson.

Somehow, that incongruous association—the feared Modernist; friend of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and George Gershwin; arch-disciple of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms; aesthetic scourge of Nazism, and the iconic American baseball great and future Hall-of-Famer—made perfect sense. It also fit with the overriding ethos of Sunday’s recital, Ax’s first solo Celebrity Series appearance since 2019.

On paper, the afternoon’s Schoenberg items—in addition to the Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, he also assayed the Drei Klavierstücke—fit neatly with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Op. 27 piano sonatas and Robert Schumann’s Fantasie in C. Chromatic, Germano-centrism reigned, and Schoenberg’s 150^th birthday this year (he’s “officially an old composer,” as Ax put it) got to be commemorated.

But the stylistic gulf between those Romantics and Schoenberg’s atonal idiom is big. It can be a heavy lift to bridge the distance between this fare’s considerable surface differences and their underlying structural connections while making both musics sound, well, satisfyingly musical. In the event, though, the pianist, who counts the 19^th-century canon as his bread and butter, proved more than up to the challenge.

In fact, in Ax’s hands the dyspeptic qualities of the Schoenberg works—their sudden, strange shifts of mood; startling contrasts of tone and texture; and unpredictable melodic lines—really did sound like extensions of Schumann and Beethoven. In fact, for melodic and motivic focus, his account of the Drei Klavierstücke was bracingly Beethovenian. The central “Mässig,” in particular, rang with ominous clarity, especially its recurring, murky rocking figure.

The Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, too, benefited from strong profiles in character. Whether impish, soulful, or—as in the closing “Sehr langsam”—haunting, these aphoristic movements added up to far more than the sum of their parts. The puckish phrasings in “Rasch, aber leicht” even garnered approving nods and a few knowing chuckles from Sunday’s attentive audience.

Neither of the Beethoven selections earned the latter. Then again, neither did they encourage it. Completed in 1801, the Op. 27 sonatas mark the composer’s break with the prevailing Classical standards for the genre.

The E-flat major effort is, like the Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, essentially epigrammatic, though painted on a bigger canvas. If Sunday’s rendition was, overall, somewhat de rigueur, the first movement’s bass line was smartly directed and the Adagio marked by rich, noble tone as well as a resonant, songful temperament.

Ax’s take on the famous “Moonlight” Sonata, on the other hand, was altogether satisfying, the hypnotic, undulating triplets of its Adagio clearly pointing towards the similar figure in Schoenberg’s 1909 opus. The cascades of notes in the finale, too, passed by furiously and the charming central Allegretto danced agreeably.

Schumann’s epic Fantasie was likewise well-focused. Ax knowingly navigated the tempestuous swells of its first movement and brought tart style to the “Im Legendenton” sequence. Some textural blurriness in the central section aside, he capably drew out the lilting rhythms in the “Etwas langsamer” episode and dispatched the treacherous leaps of the coda with surety.

The luminous finale, though, was the key to the Fantasie. Here, the pianist’s tonal warmth, lyricism, and conception of linear clarity carried the day. His execution of the music’s duple-against-triple rhythmic patterns was striking not just for its precision but for its wispy delicacy. Even the old (and older-than-Schoenberg), Ax seemed to be suggesting, was once new. The best of it can and does retain the freshness of first discovery, even after many years and repeated hearings.

As if to emphasize the point, he offered as an encore Franz Liszt’s arrangement of Franz Schubert’s “Ständchen.” With its discreet echoes of the melodic line, Liszt’s transcription proved as insightful and illuminating as Ax’s performance of it was enchanting: something old made timeless yet again.

The Celebrity Series presents the Australian Chamber Orchestra playing music by Vivaldi and others 8 p.m. October 18 at Jordan Hall. celebrityseries.org

Posted in Performances

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