Emanuel Ax

Look at his recital schedule this season and one name will jump out: Omaha, Palm Beach, New Orleans, Ridgefield, La Jolla, San Francisco, Schenectady, Rochester, and Carnegie Hall. Emanuel Ax is playing here, in a room where you can watch his hands.

Born to Polish parents in what is today Lviv, Ukraine, he moved with his family to Winnipeg as a young boy, 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. The Michaels Award followed in 1975, then the Avery Fisher Prize, and he was recently named the 2026 Musical America Artist of the Year. As Artist in Residence with Radio France for the 26/27 season he opens with a European tour through Munich, Paris, and Amsterdam, then returns to North America for a tour with The Knights that ends at Carnegie Hall, alongside orchestra dates in Boston, New York, Kansas City, Irvine, Portland, Seattle, Sarasota, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles.

He is also one of the great collaborators, with performances this season alongside his longtime friends Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. A Sony Classical exclusive artist since 1987, he is deep into a multi-year project with violinist Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma to record all of the Beethoven trios and symphonies, with the first four discs released. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates from Skidmore, the New England Conservatory of Music, Yale, and Columbia.