I heard Emanuel Ax play with the St. Louis symphony on Saturday. He had a very nice musical rapport with tympanist Richard Holmes on the Strauss Burleske in D Minor (Holmes is one of my favorite musicians in the SLSO--I love his tact and his economy of movement) and played as an encore a movement from a Schubert sonata. I was thinking there were two ways of thinking about his playing. You could view the music as a privileged glimpse into another world, one that completely transcends our own. Or: this music is, precisely, the music of our own world, and of no other. The second formulation is no less magical then the first.

Another symphony musician told me the next day that Ax is a very nice person as well.