Emanuel Ax

Born in Lvov, Poland, Emanuel Ax moved to Canada with his family when he was a young boy. He studied at The Juilliard School and Columbia University, and captured public attention in 1974 when 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 coveted Avery Fisher Prize.

As curator and participant with the Chicago Symphony for a two week spring residency “Keys to the City”, he performed multiple roles as leader and collaborator in a festival celebrating the many varied facets of the piano and its repertoire. As Artist in Residence with the New York Philharmonic for the 2012/13 season, he appears in multiple weeks at Lincoln Center with a repertoire ranging from Bach to Christopher Rouse, in addition to a spring tour with the orchestra to Europe. He returns to the orchestras in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington, and Pittsburgh where he is a beloved regular. Highlights of recent seasons included return visits to the symphonies of Boston, Houston, Toronto, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cincinnati, as well as the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics. He collaborated with San Francisco Symphony in the “American Mavericks” festival, repeated in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Ax has been an exclusive Sony Classical recording artist since 1987. Released in early 2013 is a new recital disc of works from Haydn to Schumann to Copland reflecting their different uses of the “variation” concept. He has received Grammy Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s piano sonatas and has also made a series of Grammy-winning recordings with Yo-Yo Ma of the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. Mr. Ax resides in New York City with his wife, pianist Yoko Nozaki. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates of music from Yale and Columbia Universities.