Emanuel Ax’s Virtuosity Earns Audience’s Appreciative Silence

Even the coughing stopped during Emanuel Ax’s transcendent performance of Schubert’s mighty B-flat Sonata, Monday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In the lengthy quietness of the time-stopping slow movement, for instance, a quality of attention rare in any concert hall at any time seemed to take over the audience. And that mood of deep listening prevailed throughout the work.

One cannot always account for such rare chemistry between a performer and his listeners, but it is impossible to deny. This kind of rapport marked every part of this extraordinary performance.

Ever unprepossessing, Ax resembles an absent-minded professor walking to class as he enters the stage: slightly pudgy, vaguely unkempt, modest to a fault. His greatness, his overwhelming authority as musician, technician and probing intellect emerges quickly as he plays. Within minutes, we are totally captured by his intensity and pianistic achievement.

After hearing Ax literally bang his way through John Adams’ piano concerto, “Century Rolls,” a work this listener found consistently unattractive last week, one might not have been prepared for the many beauties, thrilling tone variety and broad dynamic resources in the pianist’s Debussy-playing. But Ax’s musical versatility has been demonstrated many times over the quarter-century he has been visiting here.

In the two books of piano “Images,” Ax indicated, defined and left deeply colored these six masterpieces of Impressionistic detail. These performances recalled the kaleidoscopic subtleties we remember from the heyday of the late Walter Gieseking in the 1940s and ‘50s, whose Debussy set the standard.

Between the two books of “Images,” Ax created pure, unself-conscious delight in his irresistibly pristine playing of Bach’s B-flat Partita.

Then there was Schubert’s final sonata, its long-lined lyricism unfettered by interpretive meddling: simply articulated, perfectly gauged, handsomely laid out, its songfulness given full expression without overstatement. Since the work is perfect and needs no addendum, Ax chose to add no encores to the proceedings. As always, he made the right decision.