Born to Polish parents in what is today Lviv, Ukraine, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a boy. Ax made his New York debut in the Young Concert Artists Series. In 1974, he 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.
For the 2023-24 season, he will perform the world premiere of Anders Hillborg’s piano concerto, commissioned for him by the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen, with subsequent performances in Stockhom and New York. A continuation of the “Beethoven for 3” touring and recording project with partners Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma will take them to the Midwest in the winter.
In recital, Ax can be heard on the West Coast in the fall and the Midwest and East Coast in the spring, culminating at Carnegie Hall in April. An extensive European tour will include concerts in Holland, Italy, Germany, France and the Czech Republic.
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 cellist 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, airing 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 Fellow of 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 www.EmanuelAx.com.
July 2023
Please note: Biographies are based on information provided to the CSOA by the artists or their representatives. More current information may be available on websites of the artists or their management.
