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, and later to New York. Mr. 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. Emanuel Ax was recently named the 2026 Musical America Artist of the Year.
Artist in Residence with Radio France during the 2026/27 season, Emanuel Ax will perform five concerts in Paris throughout the year. Other highlights include appearances with the Munich Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, Spanish National Orchestra and Lucerne Festival Strings, as well as a European tour with the Dresdner Philharmonie under the baton of Sir Donald Runnicles. Following its world premiere with Boston Symphony at Tanglewood Music Festival, John Williams' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2025), dedicated to Mr. Ax, receives further performances with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic and Orchestre National de France. The season also includes a series of solo recitals in Paris, Cambridge, Monte Carlo, Milan and Turin.
Emanuel Ax has been a Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987, and following the success of the Brahms Trios with Leonidas Kavakos and 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 five discs have been released, the most recent one in August 2026. 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 he 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 (19th Century Music/Piano).
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.