Music review: Emanuel Ax recital at Soka Performing Arts Center

In his recital at the Soka Performing Arts Center in Aliso Viejo on Sunday, pianist Emanuel Ax shared the spotlight with two exceptional instruments. Ax played a bright-sounding Hamburg Steinway in the first half and a more darkly textured New York Steinway in the second.

This was the first piano recital at the 1,032-seat hall, which opened in September. The detail and depth of sonic warmth produced by Ax in a program of variations by Copland, Haydn, Beethoven and Schumann was embraced by the venue, which compares favorably to Walt Disney Concert Hall. Yasuhisa Toyota was the acoustician for both spaces.

There was an especially effective crystalline clarity to Ax’s sound in Copland’s compact and dramatic Piano Variations. Copland called his austere 1930 masterpiece a “ten-minute monster,” and it shows the composer in an atypically rigorous modernist mode. In Ax’s hands, the score’s bracing dissonance and loud chords became beautiful.

In Haydn’s touching Andante and Variations in F minor, the pianist made a case for the composer as the first great Romantic. In a rendition full of feeling, he meticulously etched the alternating variations on two themes, leading to a whispering coda.

Ax tested the resounding lower register of the Hamburg instrument in Beethoven’s “Eroica” Variations and Fugue, Opus 35. He captured the grotesquery in the opening bass chords, a self-parody of the composer’s own theme from his “Eroica” Symphony finale. Ax’s account was exhilaratingly earthy and visceral.

Even better was Ax’s uninhibited rendition of Schumann’s inspired “Symphonic Etudes.” If any single work could test the grand orchestral and intimate properties of a New York Steinway and a new concert hall, it's this one. Ax conveyed Schumann’s full range of moods, from dreamy and reflective to impetuous and passionate. His encore was an atmospheric rendering of “Pagodes” from Debussy’s “Estampes.”

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Photo: Emanuel Ax performs Sunday at the Soka Performing Arts Center. Credit: Eric Mitsuo Kimura

 

Soka Performing Arts Center: Tuning a young concert hall

The unlikely locale of Aliso Viejo may have just become Southern California’s most obliging host to orchestras coming our way.

Tuesday night’s performance by the St. Petersburg Symphony in front of more than 600 at the new Soka Performing Arts Center, the second appearance by an orchestra at the hall, confirms initial impressions that the Orange County venue welcomes all musical comers.

Yasuhisa Toyota -- largely acknowledged as the world’s leading acoustician -- has bestowed an acoustic alchemy that makes orchestras playing here sound nigh on splendid. And while there was a noticeable schism in Tuesday night’s program -- the St. Petersburg ensemble seemed more assured delivering Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony vs. Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto -- the hall itself again delivered sonic luster at almost every note.

Leaving aside the ups and downs of the performance under the baton of conductor Alexander Titov, and with guest pianist Xiayin Wang, the continuing revelations about how music sounds here are worth exploring.

Three years in the planning and two years in the construction, the acoustic design comes from Toyota, who most famously did Walt Disney Concert Hall. If anything, the sound here in this more intimate, multi-purpose hall has an even warmer sound.