The San Diego Symphony is sending an early Valentine to piano aficionados with this month’s programming. Friday (Jan. 7) at Copley Symphony Hall Emanuel Ax gave a masterful account of Mozart’s “E-flat Major Piano Concerto,” K. 482, under the baton of Music Director Jahja Ling, a program that repeats through Sunday, Jan. 9.

And next weekend, the young Chinese superstar Lang Lang will play three different concertos with the orchestra—Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Tchaikovsky—one each day Jan. 14-16. It does not get any better in San Diego, although this rich schedule would hardly raise an eyebrow on the Carnegie Hall coming attractions billboard.

Emanuel Ax.

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At the apex of his career (Ax is 61) with seven Grammys lined up on his music room shelf, Ax has nothing to prove. In performance he calls no attention to himself, but immerses himself in the music: his fingers alone unlock the profound emotional reservoir within. When the audience showers him with approval, he turns to the orchestra and directs this affection to his fellow musicians.

To say that his Mozart is characterized by refinement and elegance is by no means to imply that it is restricted to surface allure. Indeed, the fleet, buoyant legato he employed to propel the Concerto’s opening movement still allowed for brightly accented thematic ideas and bold contrasts in the turbulent development section.

His pensive, probing approach to Mozart’s C-minor second movement underscored its slightly mystical aspirations, which the composer self-consciously offset with more affable, animated commentary of the wind septet, deftly rendered by San Diego’s crack cadre of first and second wind chairs.Ling and Ax were classmates at Juilliard, and their fraternity was evident throughout the performance. Although Ling is typically a supportive concerto partner, his sensitivity was operating at an elevated level with Ax at the keyboard. From his winds Ling drew articulate and spirited responses, but he was constantly asking his first violins and violas to pipe down and allow Mozart’s subtleties room to shine.

This piano concerto was written while the composer was finishing his most successful and congenial opera THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, and the concerto exudes the joie de vivre of the opera’s opening act. Ling and Ax found that spirit and conveyed it with impressive nonchalance.

Ax favored the audience with an encore, Franz Schubert’s “G-flat Major Impromptu,” Op. 90, No. 3, which could not have sounded more luminous nor touched the heart more profoundly. His tempo was not as sustained and ethereal as Horowitz’s, but he did not turn the oscillating right-hand accompaniment into a virtuoso showpiece.

Richard Strauss’ tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” (“A Hero’s Life”) requires a massive orchestra, and it was a charge to see every square foot of the stage crammed with musicians. Nor is it typical for this orchestra to sport a phalanx of nine horn players and five trumpets fencing off the bulging percussion battery, but it certainly added muscle to Strauss’ craftily scored Battlefield Scene.The newcomer to Copley Hall might have been surprised to learn that Ling does not typically have such grand forces at his beck and call, but his ease with the sprawling orchestra made it appear to be a quotidian event.