Emanuel Ax is managed in the Netherlands by Leontien van der Vliet.
Contact:
E: leontien.vandervliet@interartists.nl
T: +31 6 5 24 68 707
Born in Lvov, Poland, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. His studies at the Juilliard School were supported by the sponsorship of the Epstein Scholarship Program of the Boys Clubs of America, and he subsequently won the Young Concert Artists Award. Additionally, he attended Columbia University, where he majored in French. Emanuel captured public attention in 1974 when he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv and in 1979 he won the coveted Avery Fisher Prize in New York.
Recent highlights in the Netherlands include tours with his old colleague and friend Iván Fischer: with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra he played Strawinsky's Capriccio and with the Budapest Festival Orchestra he played Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 17 in G KV453. With the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Bernard Haitink, he recently made a live CD recording of Brahms' First Piano Concerto. This CD also includes Schumann's Piano Quartet op. 47 with the RCO Chamber Soloists. With the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Lahav Shani he performed the Brahms Concerto no.1 in December 2019 and a year before he performed Mozart concerto no.17 under the baton of Edo de Waart. In June 2019, Emanuel Ax celebrated his 70th birthday with a recital in the Concertgebouw in the Series of Master Pianists and he gave recitals in a.o. Gronigen and in the series Piano & Passion in the MCO Hilversum.
Always a committed exponent of contemporary composers, with works written for him by John Adams, Christopher Rouse, Krzysztof Penderecki, Bright Sheng, and Melinda Wagner already in his repertoire, most recently he has added HK Gruber's Piano Concerto and Samuel Adams' Impromptus.
A Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987, recent releases include 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. In 2015 Deutche Grammophon released a duo recording with Itzhak Perlman of Sonatas by Fauré and Strauss, which the two artists presented on tour during the 2015/2016 season. Emanuel 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. His other recordings include the concertos of Liszt and Schoenberg, three solo Brahms albums, an album of tangos by Astor Piazzolla, and the premiere recording of John Adams's Century Rolls with the Cleveland Orchestra for Nonesuch. In the 2004/05 season Emanuel also contributed to an International EMMY® Award-Winning BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
A frequent and committed partner for chamber music, he has worked regularly with such artists as Young Uck Kim, Cho-Liang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Peter Serkin, Jaime Laredo, and the late Isaac Stern.
Emanuel lives in New York with his wife, the pianist Yoko Nozaki, and they have two children, 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.
