Emanuel Ax
About
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 Master Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975, he won the Young Concert Artists’ Michaels Award, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize.
The 2024-25 season began with a continuation of the Beethoven For Three touring and recording project with partners Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma, which took them to European festivals including the BBC Proms, Dresden, Hamburg, Vienna, and Luxembourg festivals. As guest soloist, he appeared during the New York Philharmonic’s opening week, which marked his 47th annual visit to the orchestra. During the season, he returned to the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, San Diego and Nashville symphonies, Pittsburgh and National symphony orchestras, and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. A fall recital tour to Toronto and Boston moved 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 took them from the West Coast through the Midwest to Georgia and Carnegie Hall, and in chamber music with the Itzhak Perlman and Friends tour to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. An extensive European tour included 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 trio launched an ambitious, multi-year project to record all the Beethoven trios and symphonies arranged for trio, of which the first two 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 album "Variations" received the Echo Klassik Award for solo recording of the year for 19th-century music on piano.
Ax is a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates of music from Skidmore College, New England Conservatory of Music, Yale University, and Columbia University. For more information about his career, please visit EmanuelAx.com.