Emanuel Ax

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. In recognition of the 50th anniversary of his first appearance with the orchestra, the 2025-26 season begins with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Carnegie Hall on October 31. Fall also includes an Asian tour that takes to Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong. Following the world premiere at Tanglewood in summer 2025, the concerto written for him by John Williams receives its Boston Symphony subscription debut in January with the New York premiere one month later with New York Philharmonic. As a guest artist he returns to orchestras in Dallas, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Charleston, Madison, Naples, and New Jersey. In recital he can be heard in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Santa Barbara, Des Moines, Cedar Falls, Schenectady, and Princeton. An extensive European tour includes concerts in Munich, Prague, Berlin, Rome, and Torino. 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 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 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.