Make a joyful noise

Classical audiences should loosen up and applaud at will

By Sam Allis

Manny Ax is my new hero.

The eminent pianist has challenged a sacred rule that an audience must follow, on pain of death, while listening to an orchestra play classical music. The one that says never applaud between movements. Never, ever, ever. As in, don't even think about it.

Most neophytes instinctively clap at the end of a movement they like before they learn better. And why not? The music was glorious and they want to reward the orchestra and/or performer. It is a visceral, immediate response that Ax finds as natural as it is commendable. But then the clappers never clap that way again. Why?

Because they're treated like Ebola carriers when they do. No one else in the hall applauds. It's like clapping in the middle of an ocean. You are a tiny, low-rent atoll in a sea of alleged sophisticates. You cringe and think of the ad for Southwest Airlines that asks someone who has just made an egregious no-no, "Wanna get away?"

Humiliation, quite simply, is the rite of passage to gain admission into the Grand Order of Aesthetes.

(My favorite story comes from a friend in D.C. who in his youth had been a page-turner for a concert pianist. He started clapping at the end of a movement. No one else did. Said pianist stared at him. The audience stared at him. He had nowhere to hide. He was on stage, frozen in the spotlight like a butterfly on a pin. Imagine.)

Emanuel Ax wants none of this. "I'm leading a one-man crusade as a listener to start applauding," he says.

Ax simply finds the silence diktat silly. "We should welcome applause whenever it comes," he writes in his blog. "And yet, we seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.

"I am always taken aback when I hear the first movement of a concerto which is supposed to be full of excitement, passion and virtuoso display [like the Brahms or Beethoven concertos], and then hear a rustling of clothing, punctuated by a few coughs; the sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction. . . . If we feel like expressing approval, we should be allowed to, ANYTIME!"

Atta boy, Manny.

He adds, "Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end."

Mark Volpe, general manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, agrees there is a snobbism attached to the vow of silence, and stands firmly with Ax on the applause issue. Volpe also recognizes that an orchestra's goal, particularly in these brutal economic times, must be to expand the classical audience, not terrify newcomers out of the hall.

So how did this rule come into being? And who is the culprit behind it? "I've talked to many distinguished musicologists and none of them can figure out who's responsible," says Ax, who has studied the subject extensively.

But he has a suspect - Richard Wagner, the brilliant, screamingly anti-Semitic, 19th-century German composer and conductor. The imperious Wagner came up with yet another one of those unpronounceable, unspellable German humdingers - "gesamptkunstwerk" - which means something along the lines of "the total work of art."

According to gesamptkunstwerk, audiences can only appreciate the totality of his work by remaining as mute as dormice until the whole shebang is over.

"This is an old, old argument," says the conductor André Previn about the applause wars. "There's nothing wrong with it unless it becomes habitual. It's like standing ovations. You get them if the music is not absolutely lousy."

"It could bother me if it impinges on the mood of a piece," Previn adds. "If you clapped after the long Bruckner adagio, you'd be in big trouble. But would clapping between movements in general bother me as a conductor? No."

Previn points out that in opera, applause after a strong aria is standard. And in jazz, as my friend Charlie notes, listeners routinely applaud during the music after a player ends a great riff.

"This is about the trappings of music, not the music," says Ax of the Edict of Silence. "I think that if there were no 'rules' about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always."

He says people are beginning to applaud more between movements. He attends many concerts and, as a listener, applauds at will with his head held high.

So listen up: the ball is in our court. Listeners must summon the gumption to applaud without wilting. But they also need cover from the stage to do so. There is a symbiotic relationship between performer and listener, says Ax, and each side needs to help the other.

Ax is always supportive when clappers make noise: "I immediately turn to the audience and bow. We need to show we are responding to what the audiences are doing. I'm hoping it happens more and more." My man.

For the record, Manny Ax is not pushing a carnival agenda. Veteran listeners at BSO concerts will always enjoy their silence between movements as a matter of custom and as a moment to digest what they've just heard.

But they need to accommodate those who applaud from their hearts after a movement. As Republicans like to claim, it's a big tent. And it is time to loosen the strictures on how we listen to live classical music. Ax's crusade is a splendid one. On with the revolution: Liberté, egalité, fraternité.

Howard Kissel, from The New York Daily News reports in his blog: "An example of the kind of programming Gilbert envisions is a concert that will feature Charles Ives' "Unanswered Question" and the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto. Emanuel Ax, Gilbert said, has agreed to perform the Beethoven right after the Ives. He accepted Gilbert's assessment that "the Ives ends nowhere and the Beethoven begins nowhere," and that perhaps the two pieces will shed light on each other".

To read the full entry, please visit www.nydailynews.com

The Strauss, though heard more often, is a slighter work. But it offers pianistic thrills as well as a few moments of dreamy introspection, and Mr. Ax played it with the vitality and thoughtfulness listeners expect of him".

To read the full review of the New York Philharmonic's concert, visit www.nytimes.com

For a certain pair of musicians in a certain Upper West Side apartment house, however, sharing the same elevator has led to hitting the road for a series of gigs.

In this case, the musicians being Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman, the road trip is taking them to places like Carnegie Hall and the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, where the piano virtuosos are playing a duo-recital next week.

The Princeton performance on Wednesday and the New York recital two days later will be their 10th and 11th stops on a whirlwind national tour that includes 13 concerts over 19 days.

It may sound exhausting, but Ax says traveling with his buddy, whose nickname is "Fima," is invigorating.

"We're having a great time," Ax says in an interview from Seattle, where he was preparing for concert number five. "Sure, it may be a little unusual, but we're old friends and neighbors, and the best way to keep our friendship alive is by making music together."

It also gives the pair a chance to do the Rachmaninoff "Symphonic Dances for Two Pianos" again in front of a live audience. "We recorded it six years ago, and we haven't played it since -- until now."

They will also be doing Brahms' "Variations on a Theme by Haydn for Two Pianos," the Mozart "Sonata for Two Pianos" and "Recuerdos," a series of Latin American dances by the composer William Bolcom.

Ax was born in Poland 49 years ago, grew up in Canada and attended the Juilliard School, where he now teaches. He is married to pianist Yoko Nozaki, and they have two children.

Bronfman, a native of Uzbekistan, is a year older and studied with Leon Fleisher.

Both men soared to international fame when they were 17 years old, with Ax winning the Arthur Rubenstein International Piano Competition in 1974 and Bronfman debuting with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony a year later. Their friendship blossomed years later, in 1995, when they found themselves living in the same apartment building.

Bronfman was there first, and eventually his new neighbors, Manny and Yoko, started popping up for a visit. It didn't take long for them to segue over to the grand piano. And they haven't stopped since.

The current tour, which concludes Nov. 23, is the fourth time in 10 years that Ax and Bronfman are traveling together.

"We'll continue as long as Fima and I keep liking each other," says Ax, "which will be a long time, I hope."

Fortunately, Seattle has been able to keep tabs on pianists Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman from their youth in the 1970s to their current status in high middle age. That has not been a boring journey, as their joint recital Tuesday night at Benaroya Hall gave ample testimony.

The two pianists, who came to America as immigrants -- Ax was born in Poland and Bronfman in Russia -- have had distinguished careers that span the globe. It would be hard to find many noted conductors or orchestras with whom they have not performed or concert halls in which have not played. They kept their musicianship fresh by alternating solo careers with chamber music and unexpected collaborations, old music with new music.

Among those remarkable collaborations are their occasional duo-piano concert tours. Tuesday's concert was their third joint appearance in Seattle, part of a 13-city American tour that dominates their November calendar.

The hall was filled with their brilliant pianism, ardent musicality and undiminished virtuosity. Textures were unusually rich and vibrant and details clear.

One of the most striking attributes of their playing together is a powerful sense of ensemble. It would seem the two men breathe together, so close are they in tune with each other, not only in terms of style and sound but also rhythmic impulse. Their dynamic range was huge, their phrasing suave, their shifts of tempo subtle and bold.

The evening opened with Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Haydn and concluded with Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances. Sandwiched in between were William Bolcom's engaging "Recuerdos" ("Reminiscences") and Mozart's Sonata in D for two pianos (K. 448).

The program had expressive range by virtue of its charm, majesty and wide-ranging bravura. Ax and Bronfman did not short-change the composers or the audience.

Brahms' set of variations is better known in its symphonic form, but its version for two pianos has an air of intimacy that is welcome. Ax and Bronfman, who alternated first and second piano, had a sure sense for the Brahms' tuneful variations, each given their own individuality without sacrificing the coherence of the whole.

"Recuerdos" was composed by Bolcom in 1991. The local boy (born in Seattle, educated at the University of Washington) who made good has long been intrigued by various combinations of high and low art. In this homage to Latin America, Bolcom evokes 19th-century dances. The result is immediate, fun and tuneful. Ax and Bronfman sensed its easygoing allure and played with it.

The Mozart sonata that followed is a different kettle of fish, yet also appealing, gallant and fresh, as well as refined. There is little to disturb a gleeful mood. But the work is more than mere "entertainment," to borrow a word from one of Mozart's most distinguished biographers, it also is sublime. Ax and Bronfman captured this duality with verve and attitude. They made Mozart big and important, but with a wink, too.

Rachmaninoff often appears on their duo programs and so on this occasion it was the two-piano arrangement of Symphonic Dances. The performance was an exhilirating conclusion to an exhilirating concert.

The audience was enthusiastic and rewarded with a single encore -- a Slavonic dance of Dvorak in which the two pianists moved from two pianos to one.

"I’ve got jet lag," he said from New York City at the end of October. "The tour [with the Los Angeles Philharmonic] was only eight days, but it was far."

Within days, he and pianist Emanuel Ax - his longtime friend, colleague and neighbor - would start rehearsing for their 13-citym two-piano U.S. concert tour. It began Nov. 5 in Syracuse and will end Nov. 23 in Virginia.  Along the way, they’ll play on Tuesday at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall and on Friday at Carnegie Hall. It is the first time the two men have played a two-piano recital at either hall.

The concept for doing a two-piano tour came about naturally, Bronfman said.

"I've known Manny forever, since I was a student," he said. "And I’ve always done two-piano works throughout my career, first with my teacher and then with some of the greatest pianists in the world. Pianists love to play together." read more...