Art & Creativity Quote by Emanuel Ax

Ax is smuggling a quiet manifesto into a bit of stagecraft. Put the platform in the middle of the hall and you don’t just change sightlines; you change the social contract. The old proscenium setup turns classical music into a polite hierarchy: artists up front, audience in the dark, applause as a scheduled verdict. Ax’s in-the-round staging redraws that geometry into something more democratic and, crucially, more vulnerable. When performers are surrounded, there’s no single “front,” no privileged seat of authority. Everyone is visible to everyone else. That visibility raises the stakes: the musicians can’t hide behind a wall of projection, and listeners can’t disappear into anonymous consumption.

“I feel that we are all experiencing the music together” lands as both aspiration and critique. It’s a gentle rebuke to the museum-like habits that still cling to concert culture, where reverence can harden into distance. Ax isn’t arguing for casualness; he’s arguing for presence. The subtext is that intimacy is not a vibe but a design choice, and design shapes attention. Surrounded by listeners, the performers read the room in real time: breath, stillness, micro-reactions. The audience, meanwhile, becomes part of the event’s texture, hearing the music alongside other bodies rather than through the isolating tunnel of etiquette.

Context matters: Ax, a major pianist with institutional credibility, can afford to question the ritual without being dismissed as a populist. He’s using authority to loosen formality, not to abolish it, betting that classical music survives by feeling shared again.