Emanuel Ax | Piano

Born in Lvov, Poland, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. His studies at the Juilliard School were supported by the sponsorship of the Epstein Scholarship Program of the Boys Clubs of America, and he subsequently won the Young Concert Artists Award. Additionally, he attended Columbia University, where he majored in French. Emanuel Ax captured public attention in 1974 when he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv and in 1979 he won the coveted Avery Fisher Prize in New York.

Emanuel Ax opened the 2012/13 season with a ten concert tour of European summer festivals with the London Symphony Orchestra and Michael Tilson Thomas during which he performed concertos by Brahms, Beethoven and Feldman across Germany, Austria and Italy. This season he also tours with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and as part of his residency with the New York Philharmonic joins them for six concerts including Istanbul, Berlin and Vienna. Other orchestral appearances feature the Orchestre de Paris, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Dresden Staatskapelle, Stockholm Philharmonic and the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich. His chamber music appearances include a repeat of his Wigmore Hall series of Beethoven Sonatas with Leonidas Kavakos in the Vienna Musikverein as well as Brahms Sonatas with Frank Peter Zimmermann in Germany. Following very successful collaborations with the Mark Morris Dance Group in New York, London and Vienna over previous seasons, Emanuel Ax revives his Mozart piano concerti project with them for six performances of Mozart Piano Concerti at Teatro Real, Madrid.

Highlights of the 2011/12 season included return visits to the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Bayerische Rundfunk, London Philharmonic, Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Orchestre National de France under the batons of Sir Simon Rattle, Mariss Jansons, Vladimir Jurowski, Bernard Haitink and Sir Colin Davis. He also appeared with the Orquesta Nacionales de España and Orchestra filarmonica della Scala and in the United States he curated and participated in "Keys to the City", a two week residency with Chicago Symphony celebrating the many varied facets of the piano.

In recognition of the bicentenaries of Chopin and Schumann in 2010 and in partnership with London’s Barbican, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, Emanuel Ax commissioned new works from composers Thomas Adés, Peter Lieberson and Stephen Prutsman for three recital programs presented in each of those cities with colleagues Yo-Yo Ma and Dawn Upshaw. In addition to this large-scale project, recent tours included performances in Asia with the New York Philharmonic on their first tour with Music Director Alan Gilbert and European tours with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Pittsburgh Symphony and the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

Emanuel Ax has been an exclusive Sony Classical artist since 1987 and his notable recordings include the Grammy Award winning albums of Haydn piano sonatas and Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano with Yo-Yo Ma. Recent releases feature Mendelssohn’s trios with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, Strauss's Enoch Arden narrated by Patrick Stewart, and discs of two-piano music by Brahms and Rachmaninov with Yefim Bronfman. His other recordings include the concertos of Liszt and Schoenberg, Chopin, Brahms 2nd and the premiere recording of John Adams' Century Rolls with the Cleveland Orchestra (for Nonesuch), as well as three solo Brahms albums and an album of tangos by Astor Piazzolla.

In recent years, Emanuel Ax has turned his attention toward the music of 20th-century composers, premiering works by John Adams, Christopher Rouse, Krzysztof Penderecki, Bright Sheng, and Melinda Wagner. He is also devoted to chamber music, and has worked regularly with such artists as Young Uck Kim, Cho-Liang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Peter Serkin, Jaime Laredo, and the late Isaac Stern.

Emanuel Ax lives in New York with his wife, the pianist Yoko Nozaki, and they have two children, Joseph and Sarah. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates of music from Yale and Columbia Universities.

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