Emanuel Ax Quotes

A lot of it just has to do with luck, serendipity.

Even if you don’t like a concert of mine, please, please applaud at the end anyway.

If the audience walks out of a concert thinking, What a wonderful experience, then we have done our job.

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 have always thought that my ear is also very influenced by my eyes.

Everybody makes his path differently.

Pianists don’t argue too much generally because we have such a hard time just getting things right; arguing is for string players.

We seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.

We should welcome applause whenever it comes.

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.

If there were no rules about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always.

When one plays a Steinway, there is a warmth and nobility in the sound that is unequalled by any other instrument.