Quotes by Emanuel Ax

• I have always thought that my ear is also very influenced by my eyes.
• All of us love applause, and so we should - it means that the listener likes us!
• Applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty.
• Even if you don't like a concert of mine, please, please applaud at the end anyway.
• Everybody makes his path differently.
• A lot of it just has to do with luck, serendipity.
• How wonderful it is to play with someone you feel very close to.
• We should welcome applause whenever it comes.
• I have been coming to Los Angeles since 1975 to perform.
• I have been trying to find out exactly when listeners and performers decided that applause between movements would not be allowed, but nobody seems to have been willing to admit that they were the culprit.
• I usually only play with very close friends.
• If the audience walks out of a concert thinking, What a wonderful experience, then we have done our job.
• If there were no rules about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always.
• It is wonderful to see how happy all my friends in the LA Philharmonic are in their new home.
• 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.
• Pianists don't argue too much generally because we have such a hard time just getting things right; arguing is for string players.
• Sometimes I wish that applause would come just a bit later, when it is so beautifully hushed that I feel like holding my breath in the silence of the end.
• The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.
• The stage is close to being in the middle of the hall, so that the performers are surrounded by the listeners. I feel that we are all experiencing the music together.
• We seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.
• Everyone is different. Sometimes it's very exciting; sometimes very scary.