Edition: U.S. / Global

Two Grand Pianos, One Way of Life

Published: December 27, 1996

FOR performers, musical and otherwise, ego is usable if not necessary capital, and any overabundance tends to flow indiscriminately into their personalities. Emanuel Ax is a famous exception, an acclaimed concert pianist who sheds the grand manner as quickly as he doffs his concert tails, becoming to any and all simply Manny, the guy next door.

Is this just another studied persona in a profession rife with them? Repeated encounters with the pianist suggest not. Indeed, it becomes hard to imagine a performer more genuinely and spontaneously self-effacing than Mr. Ax.

Unless it is his wife, Yoko Nozaki. Ms. Nozaki, who is also a pianist, is to make her Carnegie Hall debut tomorrow evening, joining Mr. Ax and the New York String Orchestra, led by Jaime Laredo, in Mozart's Concerto for Two Pianos (K. 365).

A genial, effervescent woman with an edge to her humor that undoubtedly helps keep Mr. Ax modest, Ms. Nozaki readily agreed to be interviewed with her husband recently at their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But no sooner had preliminaries been completed, with the proud parents announcing that their 18-year-old son, Joseph, had just been notified of his early acceptance to Yale University next year, than Ms. Nozaki disappeared to busy herself in another room.

''Hm,'' Mr. Ax said. ''Yoko,'' he called, to no avail.

''To tell the truth, I sympathize with her a lot, because I play much more often than she does,'' he started on his own. ''So I really understand why it's very hard to have these periods when you don't play onstage, and then to have to regenerate the confidence and all that. It's very hard to get on stage.''

Ms. Nozaki eventually reappeared, evidently realizing that her mere presence did not require her to say much. She ventured little more than an occasional wisecrack. When asked to account for a seeming lack of prodigious musical talent in their two children, she replied, ''Just lucky, I guess.''

Characteristically, Mr. Ax amplified. ''I think we bent over backward not to be musical parents,'' he said. ''We gave Joey tennis lessons, and we tried to watch his schoolwork and so forth, and we weren't nearly as determined about his piano lessons. And I think that had we not been musicians, we probably would have done a lot more with that.''

Certainly, Ms. Nozaki's parents did. She was born in Tokyo but declines to say exactly when. Her mother, a piano teacher then as now, started her on the instrument at about 3. Her father, a biochemist, took a job at Duke University in 1963, so she spent her early teens in Durham, N.C., where her parents still live.

She studied at the Juilliard School in New York with Irwin Freundlich. Mr. Ax, who was born to Polish parents in Lvov, Ukraine, in 1949, was studying at Juilliard at the same time, with Mieczyslaw Munz, but the two students did not strike up a relationship until they took part in a summer program run by the violinist Joseph Fuchs and the pianist Artur Balsam in Orono, Me., in 1969.

''We had sort of seen each other, but we hadn't talked,'' Mr. Ax said. ''I was kind of attracted, and I pursued her, and we've been together ever since. It's very boring, because nothing else happened.''

Nothing but a seemingly joyous marriage of 22 years and an illustrious career for Mr. Ax. But what of his wife's career? Ms. Nozaki gave her New York debut recital in 1972 but has since performed relatively little on her own.

''We got married, and I don't think I was ever that ambitious anyway,'' she said in a burst of volubility, letting her husband pick up the thought.

''I think these things aren't necessarily conscious decisions at all,'' Mr. Ax said. ''Aside from practicing and working to become a real musician, it takes an unbelievable amount of luck to start pursuing concerts. By the time we got married, I got lucky. I won a competition, and I started playing. And Yoko was doing some teaching. And it kind of just fell out that way. There was no conscious decision for one person to do something and the other not to.''

Ms. Nozaki gave up teaching in 1979 and began performing with her husband the following year. ''I haven't done any solo work in many, many years, and I don't think I can anymore,'' she said. ''So don't ask about that.''

The couple have continued to collaborate twice a year or so. The Mozart concerto is something of a specialty that they mostly reserve for themselves, although Mr. Ax has also played it with two pianist-conductors, Christoph Eschenbach and Wolfgang Sawallisch.

They continue to expand their repertory, having learned Rachmaninoff's daunting ''Symphonic Dances'' for a recital at the Freer Gallery in Washington this month. And they are returning to Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion for the Ojai Festival in California next summer.

''We might be learning a short piece by Luciano Berio, too,'' Mr. Ax said. ''I haven't told you that yet,'' he added to his wife, who resignedly inquired as to its difficulty.

''I don't know,'' Mr. Ax said. ''I haven't seen the score yet.''

There are probably few difficulties that a lot of practice won't solve, but finding two pianos in close proximity is not always easy. To practice together, the couple go up to the apartment of their fellow pianist Yefim Bronfman, in the same building, or trek to the warehouse of a distributor, Pro Piano, in lower Manhattan.

Having moved from another building on the Upper West Side last year after neighbors complained about the ''noise'' of their pianos, they now have a spacious apartment with a German Steinway grand in the living room and an American counterpart in a soundproof back room. While they were showing off the apartment, the back room, with its television, had been taken over by its after-hours occupant, their 13-year-old daughter, Sarah.

''She really has a mind of her own,'' Mr. Ax said of his daughter. ''In our family the women are much more mature and decisive than the men. I'm really beginning to feel that we are the inferior sex.''

Ms. Nozaki responded with typical terseness and pointedness, ''O.K.''

Carnegie Concert

The New York String Orchestra, conducted by Jaime Laredo and featuring the pianists Emanuel Ax and Yoko Nozaki, is to perform at Carnegie Hall at 8 P.M. tomorrow. Tickets are $9 to $32. Information: (212) 247-7800.

Photo: Emanuel Ax and his wife, Yoko Nozaki, at Pro Piano, preparing for tomorrow's concert, which is Ms. Nozaki's Carnegie Hall debut. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times) (pg. C12)