South Florida Classical Review

Emanuel Ax performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 with the Palm Beach Symphony Sunday at the Kravis Center. Photo: Nigel Parry

Emanuel Ax turns 77 next month. But at a performance Sunday in West Palm Beach, there wasn’t a trace of deterioration in the American pianist’s technique or in his engagement with the music.

Onstage at the Kravis Center, he appeared in the Palm Beach Symphony’s final concert of the season playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22.

While he has performed this concerto many times, there remained a freshness in his playing and a clear absorption in the performance. During an orchestral passage in the Andante, for example, he turned his head toward the woodwinds as they played, then leaned down to the keyboard to answer their melody with a similarly phrased statement of his own.

In the opening Allegro, he brought lively, highly articulated playing to the delicate phrases with which the piano answers the grandiose opening tutti. While he played with refinement in Mozart’s melodies, he also brought strength and vigor to grand sweeps up the keyboard in the movement’s minor-key middle section.

In the second movement, his sensitive playing of the melodies contrasted with his rumbling, incisive playing of the bass line. In the melodious last movement, his playing was light but lyric, with effortless playing in the runs and flourishes with which he accompanied tunes in the orchestra. As an encore, he played Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 27, no. 2 with a luminous tone and warm, expressive phrasing.

Under music director Gerard Schwarz, the orchestra played with accuracy, but there was a subdued quality to the playing, without much jubilation or rhythmic verve. Woodwinds distinguished themselves, however, in a concerto in which they play a crucial role, with particularly expressive playing in the poignant variations of the Andante.

The concert opened with a taut and energetic performance of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. Schwarz calibrated the dynamics to bring out the drama in Beethoven’s work while leaving room for an exultant outburst at the end.

To close out the season, Schwarz chose The Planets by Gustav Holst, an English astrology buff whose musical portrayals of seven planets are full of grandeur, mystery and menace.

Schwarz took a brisk tempo in the opening Mars movement, leading the orchestra through a lighter, less march-like account of the famous music. This gave the movement a fleet, shimmering quality before Schwarz led the orchestra to a ferocious climax.

There was occasional loose playing in some of the other movements. In Mercury, the Winged Messenger, where the music should sparkle and take flight, a lack of ensemble precision gave it a mushy quality, a problem which attended other rapid passages for the full orchestra.

But in general, the orchestra came off well. The noble theme of the Jupiter movement became a rich, affirmative statement, with warm playing in the strings and brass. The Saturn movement was eerie, ominous and full of understated power. Uranus, the Magician gave off thumping, clanking energy.

The Young Singers of the Palm Beaches handled the vocal part of the final movement, Neptune, the Mystic. Standing to the left of the stage, they sang with haunting tones in their wordless music, still singing as they walked backstage one by one as the music faded away.

For next season’s seven concerts, the Palm Beach Symphony has lined up a stellar set of soloists, including the pianists Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Yefim Bronfman and Daniil Trifonov, violinists Augustin Hadelich, Pinchas Zukerman and Ray Chen and cellist Julian Schwarz. 

The opening concert is Nov. 17 with Thibaudet performing Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5 “Egyptian.” palmbeachsymphony.org

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