Happy Hour with Emanuel Ax
For someone who has been at the piano for seventy years, Emanuel Ax shouldn’t be so worried about performing. “I get terribly nervous when I play,” he said softly, standing on the stage at WQXR’s Greene Space, near SoHo. “But at least I usually know what’s about to happen. Here, I’m not so sure.”
Ax, who is seventy-six, was about to record a special launch-party show to celebrate his new podcast, “Classical Music Happy Hour,” in front of an audience of more than a hundred people. Five chairs were set up onstage for panelists, and a sixth would be added for a surprise guest—Yo-Yo Ma, the world-renowned cellist and Ax’s friend of fifty-plus years. “I like virtually everybody,” Ax said. “But I love that man.”
Ax shuffled to a regal Steinway grand to run through a four-handed piece—“Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance Op. 46 No. 1,” he said. “Not that anybody cares.” The other two hands belonged to one of the panelists, the actor David Hyde Pierce. The pair had met at a benefit in Los Angeles, where Pierce had bravely told Ax that he, too, tickled the ivories.
“I’m sort of in heaven, so it doesn’t matter how the sound check goes,” Pierce said.
Ax seemed to be in hell. “I hope we get through it,” he said. “We’re going to screw up a lot.” He was right. Their page-turner, the WQXR host Jeff Spurgeon, was no help; despite Pierce’s violent nodding, he missed a few crucial flips. (“All of my page-turning gigs have been last-minute,” Spurgeon said.)
“I assume the engineers will take care of stuff,” Pierce said. “They’ll have their work cut out for them.”
In the greenroom, picking at crusted-over hummus and sliced salami, Ax tried to distract himself by getting to know another panelist, the linguist and music teacher John McWhorter. “Do you do—?” he started to ask.
“I’m a pretty good cabaret pianist,” McWhorter said. “And I also played cello for many years as a kid.” He giggled, worried that he’d let slip the Yo-Yo secret. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
When showtime arrived, Ma sneaked in a side door just as cameras started to roll. Onstage, Ax’s jitters melted into charm. “Who would be your ideal guest?” the m.c., WQXR’s Elliott Forrest, asked.
Ax replied, “Obviously, Beethoven would be great, but he’d be asking ‘What?’ all the time.”
Then came time for the Dvořák. Ax and Pierce launched into triumphant C major, tufts of white hair jostling as they crashed through their mistakes. Spurgeon stood behind them, following intently; he whipped a page, jaw clenched. (His wife, sitting close to the stage, squealed, “Yes! Yes!”)
As the action was winding down, the sixth chair was placed. “It’s incredibly nice of him to make the effort and come and see all of us,” Ax said. “It’s my friend Yo-Yo Ma!” Ma trotted out holding a cello, to One Direction-level applause. He nestled himself in the piano’s curve, and the two old friends eased into an arrangement of “Over the Rainbow.” Ma’s bow danced over the strings; Ax’s fingers glistened across the keys. The room was still, and Pierce began to cry.
“We’ve developed a sixth sense,” Ma said, after the show. “We’re not looking at one another, but we know exactly when to do something.”
“You have a very expressive back,” Ax said.
Ma, ever the muse, was the one who inspired Ax’s pivot to podcasting. “It came from Yo-Yo’s idea of doing a music ‘Car Talk,’ ” Ax explained. Ma shook his head in protest, but Ax bulldozed on: “And they wanted both of us to do it, but you had too many things going. I had more time.” He added, with a smile, “I follow your life!”
“We’re like an old married couple,” Ma said. “Every time I go to Manny’s house, he’s got all these wonderful wine bottles. It’s a friendship with benefits.”
“The alcohol I drink most is probably white wine,” Ax said.
“And you drink champagne,” Ma corrected.
“I thought that was a wine,” Ax replied.
“Well, you said white wine,” Ma said. Checkmate.
“We try not to drink too much,” Ax said. “We’re very easy to put away.” They looked at each other with boyish glints. Conversation turned, inevitably, to music. “By definition, we cannot reach the aspirational goal,” Ax said, loftily. “There’s no perfect performance.”
Ma nodded. “And ‘Over the Rainbow,’ for example, is about yearning,” he said. “If the bluebird can, why can’t we?”
Perfect performance or not, Ax thought the live show had gone well. “I was silly in all the right places,” he said. He was even O.K. with the messy Dvořák. “We had to play something,” he said. “Since I don’t talk so good.” ♦