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, later to New York. He 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.
During the 2025/26 season Emanuel Ax undertakes an extensive tour of Asia featuring concerts in Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong. Following the world premiere at Tanglewood in summer 2025, the concerto written for him by John Williams will have its Boston Symphony Orchestra subscription debut in January with the New York premiere one month later with the New York Philharmonic. The European premiere will take place with the Berlin Philharmonic in April and during the season Emanuel Ax returns to the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI.
He has been a Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987 and following the success of the Brahms Trios with violinist Leonidas Kavakos and cellist Yo-Yo 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 recently 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 Emanuel 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, his recording "Variations" received the Echo Klassik Award for Solo Recording of the Year in the category Piano Music of the 19th Century.
Emanuel 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.