Emanuel Ax

Born in Lvov in Poland, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg in Canada with his family when he was a young boy. The Epstein Scholarship Programme of the Boys Clubs of America supported his studies at the Juilliard School and he subsequently won the Young Concert Artists Award. Emanuel Ax captured public attention in 1974 when he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1979 he won the coveted Avery Fisher Prize in New York.

In the 2019/20 season Emanuel Ax joins the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle on an extensive tour of China and Hong Kong, as well as performing with the Rotterdam Philharmonic in the Netherlands and on tour in the USA. He also returns to the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, playing concertos by Brahms, Mozart and Chopin.

During the summer of 2020 Emanuel Ax will also join the Staatskapelle Dresden on tour in the Mediterranean with Myung-Whun Chung. He performs extensively in North America, including in his hometown with the New York Philharmonic, as well as in Cincinnati, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

A committed exponent of contemporary music, with works written for him by John Adams, Christopher Rouse, Krzysztof Penderecki, Bright Sheng and Melinda Wagner, he recently added HK Gruber’s Piano Concerto and Samuel Adams’s Impromptus to his repertoire.

Emanuel Ax has been an exclusive Sony Classical artist since 1987 and has won several coveted awards, including a number of Grammys. Recent releases include the Brahms piano trios with Yo-Yo Ma and Leonidas Kavakos, Strauss’s Enoch Arden, narrated by Patrick Stewart, and discs of two-piano music by Brahms and Rachmaninoff with Yefim Bronfman.

Emanuel Ax lives in New York with his wife, the 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.