A Solid but Passionless Emanuel Ax

Since Emanuel Ax’s first Los Angeles-area appearance, at the Claremont Colleges in 1975, six months after he won the first International Artur Rubinstein Competition, the Polish-born American pianist has become a fixture of our musical life.

He has given numerous recitals, orchestral concerts--with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the management of which justifiably cherishes him--and has produced expert chamber music performances with both local and international colleagues.

Through these 21 years, Ax has proved himself a pianist of versatility and depth, as well as virtuoso technique. Yet, his solid, often probing performances are less than outgoing. He plays honestly but seldom shares himself with the listener.

His latest appearance, Wednesday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, was a connoisseur’s recital, surveying a historical array of variations. Ax again conquered a difficult program, but kept his emotional cards close to the vest. In large-boned pieces, some of them masterpieces, by Bach, Schubert, Copland, Chopin, Webern and Brahms, his playing gave the sense and surfaces of these works without regularly illuminating them.

It may be a paucity of imagination that keeps Ax from connecting with his audience. He delivers the music, but without its extra dimensions of joy, anger, ecstasy, resentment, triumph, depression or lightheartedness. Instead, an undifferentiated and unshaded earnestness marks most of his performances.

Even so, Ax produces controlled and well-paced readings.

His way with Busoni’s famous transcription of Bach’s D-minor Chaconne revealed the general thrust and many of the smaller details in the piece; one missed only its colors, hues and inner life. Schubert’s wonderfully extrovert Impromptu in B-flat, Opus 142, No. 3, sounded neat but unconvincing.

Ax delivered more passion in Copland’s epochal Variations (1930), with well-delineated rhetoric and urgency, a quality truly missing in his playing of Chopin’s sometimes underrated “Variations Brillantes,” Opus 12.

Clearly, Ax loves Anton von Webern’s compressed Variations, Opus 27, for he brought to it the same care, affection, tight detailing and drive with which he had lit up the Copland work. Then, the evening’s finale and climax, Brahms’ large-scale, kaleidoscopic “Handel” Variations, Opus 24, displayed again a characteristic Ax performance: solid, stylistically aware, technically impeccable and thoroughly uncompelling.