Skip to page content

Emanuel Ax

piano

About this Artist

Born to Polish parents in what is today Lviv, Ukraine, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. Ax made his New York debut in the Young Concert Artists Series and in 1974 won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975, he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize.

The 2024/25 season begins with a continuation of the Beethoven for Three touring and recording project, with partners Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma, that takes him to European festivals including BBC Proms, Dresden, Hamburg, Vienna, and Luxembourg. As guest soloist, he appears during the New York Philharmonic’s opening week, marking his 47th annual visit to the orchestra. During the season he returns to the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras; National, San Diego, Nashville, and Pittsburgh symphonies; and Rochester Philharmonic. A fall recital tour from Toronto and Boston moves west to include San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles, culminating in the spring in Chicago and his annual Carnegie Hall appearance. A special project with clarinetist Anthony McGill travels from the West Coast through the Midwest to Georgia and Carnegie Hall, and he joins the Itzhak Perlman and Friends chamber music program in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. An extensive European tour includes concerts in Paris, Oslo, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Warsaw, and Israel.

Ax has been a Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987, and following the success of the Brahms trios with Kavakos and Ma, the three launched an ambitious, multiyear project to record all the Beethoven trios and symphonies arranged for trio, of which the first three discs have been released. He has received Grammy Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s piano sonatas. He has also made a series of Grammy-winning recordings with Yo-Yo Ma of the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. In the 2004/05 season Ax contributed to an International Emmy Award-winning BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In 2013, Ax’s recording Variations received the Echo Klassik Award for Solo Recording of the Year (19th Century Music/Piano).

Ax is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary Doctor of Music degrees from Skidmore College, New England Conservatory of Music, Yale University, and Columbia University.