★★★★★
There's no doubt about it - Emanuel Ax plays these Chopin works with incredible sensitivity and intelligence. His Ballades can stand with the best from the competition, which includes such stalwarts as Ashkenazy, Glemser, Kissin, and Lise de la Salle. Ax's First Ballade is brilliantly atmospheric in its contrasts: he imparts an appropriately forlorn and agitated character to the main theme and a lovely, songful quality to the alternate theme...
- www.classical.net
2013-09-17
★★★★★
Summary for the Busy Executive: Meaty. Arnold Schoenberg argued for the variation principle as the foundation of musical art, and variation form always struck me as central to Beethoven's composition, beyond the actual variations he wrote. After all, you can view the Fifth Symphony's opening movement and scherzo as monumental variations on the essentially one simple idea (da-da-da-DUM). The variation form began very simply: a set of compositions of differing character linked by the same theme...
- www.classical.net
2013-05-09
★★★★★
Think of this album as a classical remix project... done by the composers. "Variations" was the magic word that was deployed when a composer had a penchant for jamming. There's plenty of well-documented proof, aside from this album, that Beethoven had a knack for improvisation. He sometimes hid it from his stricter teachers, fearing it would appear too gauche and free...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-04-29
★★★★★
Emanuel Ax chooses three rather disparate variation works for his latest album. All of them are well known compositions and all get incisive performances. As most listeners are probably aware, the Beethoven Eroica Variations is a work featuring the main theme from the finale of the composer's watershed Third Symphony (Eroica) that goes on to offer fifteen variations of it and a Finale...
- www.classical.net
2013-04-01
★★★★★
These well-rendered traversals may strike the impetuous-minded as a bit finicky in places, but Ax convincingly wins you over with his self-effacing vision of the scores and his subtle gradations of dynamics, which combine to produce pianism of feeling and intellect, pianism that seduces the ear. His accounts of the G mnor Capriccio and E major Intermezzo from Op. 116, for instance, deftly catch the sensual side of the composer's muse...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
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