Emanuel Ax

Emanuel Ax was born in Lvov, Poland, and grew up in Winnipeg, Canada. His studied at the Juilliard School where he subsequently won the Young Concert Artists Award. He also majored in French at Columbia University. Ax 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. Since then there is hardly a major concert… Show more hall, orchestra or chamber performer with whom Emanuel Ax has not worked. His decades at the top of the clasical music scene attests to the depth of his musicality and creativity.

Ax has released many recordings, most recently the Mendelssohn Trios with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, Strauss’ Enoch Arden narrated by Patrick Stewart, and discs of two-piano music by Brahms and Rachmaninoff with Yefim Bronfman. Ax 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 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, Mr. Ma, Edgar Meyer, Peter Serkin, Jaime Laredo and the late Isaac Stern.

Ax resides in New York City with his wife, pianist Yoko Nozaki. They have two children together, 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. Program:
Beethoven – Sonata in A Op. 2 No. 2
Beethoven – Sonata in C minor Op. 13 “Pathetique”
Chopin – Sonata No. 3 in B minor Op. 58

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