{"id":17327,"date":"2025-12-16T10:35:39","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T15:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=17327"},"modified":"2025-12-16T13:43:03","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T18:43:03","slug":"emanuel-ax-named-musical-america-artist-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/emanuel-ax-named-musical-america-artist-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Emanuel Ax Named Musical America Artist of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Musical America<\/a><\/p>\n

By Stuart Isacoff<\/p>\n

Emanuel Ax, at age 76, combines the pianistic insight of an old master with the freshness and modesty of a newcomer. His half-century career has been based in the classics\u2014Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Haydn\u2014but this season he is barnstorming with a new, bespoke work: John Williams\u2019s jazzy piano concerto.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you sure you haven\u2019t made a mistake?\u201d asks Emanuel Ax, when told about his Musical America Artist of the Year award. Ax\u2019s modesty is well known among friends and colleagues. Despite many honors, including multiple Grammy Awards, competition gold, and Lincoln Center\u2019s prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, Manny Ax (everyone calls him that) is, as ever, a study in humility.<\/p>\n

That unaffected quality pervades Ax\u2019s musical approach as well. In his rendering of the standard repertoire, no egoistic quirks intrude on the musical flow. Chopin\u2019s intimate Ballade in F minor is sensitively shaped yet unfussy. His Haydn is buoyant, crisp, and playful; his Brahms, alternately regal and ruminative. There is a compelling, thoroughly human face to it all.<\/p>\n

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. Those roots played an important role in his musical development. Early on, he inherited the idea of \u201cbalance, of not overdoing anything,\u201d from his early teacher, the Polish virtuoso Mieczyslaw Munz. \u201cI learned a lot about practice habits from him,\u201d Ax says. \u201cHe believed in slow practice, practice in rhythms, and in getting things right. He didn\u2019t analyze things harmonically, but rather focused on getting things to sound good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hearing the great pianists at Carnegie Hall was as much of an education as his private lessons. \u201cI\u2019d hear a Horowitz or Richter and think, \u2018That\u2019s how I want to play it,\u2019 then hear Rubinstein and think, \u201cNo, I want to play it like that!\u2019 And so on. By the time you\u2019ve absorbed it all you\u2019re not really imitating, you\u2019re grabbing hold of the inspiration, and hoping it becomes a part of you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chamber music became a specialty for him, primarily from the influence of two Juilliard teachers: violinists Felix Galimir and Lewis Kaplan. Then, he met cellist Yo-Yo Ma, five years younger and the idea of chamber playing took on greater dimensions. \u201cAt Juilliard, I was majoring in \u2018Cafeteria\u2019\u2014and Manny hung out there too.\u201d Ma jokes.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the friendship grew deeper, we talked about large musical questions,\u201d he continues. \u201cWhere, for example, does the violin or cello fit into the whole tapestry of music, when the piano is generally given a larger portion of a composition? The public perception of a soloist with an accompanist is often not an adequate description of what is happening. And sometimes the most obvious aspect of a
\npiece of music, the part that gets an audience\u2019s attention, is actually not the most important part.<\/p>\n

We have a shared value system,\u201d Ma says. \u201cAnd at this point we\u2019ve played together for so many years that we have a sixth sense of each other\u2019s gestures, and of an inevitability in the way things will go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ax made his New York debut in 1974, in the Young Concert Artists series. In 1974, he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv, and spent some time with that titan of the piano. \u201cI played the Brahms D minor Concerto,\u201d Ax says. \u201cRubinstein asked me, \u2018when you enter, why do you play so fast?\u2019 I had my reasons. But then he added, \u2018when my friend Joseph Joachim played\u2026\u2019 Of course I did what he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve since played it many different ways. I still think the best description of how the piano should enter in that work came from my friend Michael Tilson Thomas. He said that after the orchestra performs its great triumphal passage, \u2018Picture your Jewish grandmother sitting in the corner, and she goes, \u2018Oy.\u2019 [Orchestra theme continues] Da da da da da\u2026 \u2018Oy.\u2019 It’s so typical of Brahms: He gets to this ecstasy and then\u2026\u2018Not so fast!\u201d<\/p>\n

Critics the world over recognized Ax\u2019s gifts soon after the Rubinstein Competition triumph, and they have done so ever since. A 2015 review of a Beethoven concert in The Guardian is typical. It praised his \u201cfleet fingerwork\u201d and the \u201clogical balance between\u2026quirkiness and maintaining an elegant flow.\u201d Summing up, the newspaper deemed the performance \u201ca masterclass.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pianist\u2019s early recordings included collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma and violinists Isaac Stern and Young Uck Kim, as well as piano recitals and performances with major orchestras. He has been a Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987. Following the success of the Brahms trio recording with violinist Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma, the three musicians launched an ambitious, multi-year Beethoven project: all the Trios, along with trio arrangements of the symphonies; the first three discs have been released. He has received GRAMMY\u00ae Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn\u2019s
\npiano sonatas. He has also made a series of GRAMMYwinning
\nrecordings with Yo-Yo Ma<\/p>\n

Ax\u2019s most headline-grabbing recent adventure has been John Williams\u2019s Piano Concerto, which the famed composer wrote it at his urging. \u201cThis was me being cheeky,\u201d Ax says. \u201cI met [Williams] over the years at Tanglewood and when he announced that he wanted to write a piano concerto, I wrote to him and said that I would love to play it. He focused on three jazz greats as inspiration for the piece: Art Tatum, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson. It\u2019s not that the music sounds like any of them, except in a couple of spots. But it was a way for him to start.\u201d<\/p>\n

The concerto had its world premiere at Tanglewood in summer 2025. Ax this year will play the work\u2019s Boston Symphony subscription debut in January, and the New York premiere one month later with New York Philharmonic. \u201cIt was a lot of work, a lot of notes,\u201d he admits. But certainly not too many for Emanuel Ax.<\/p>\n

Learn more about Emanuel Ax.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Musical America By Stuart Isacoff Emanuel Ax, at age 76, combines the pianistic insight of an old master with the freshness and modesty of a newcomer. His half-century career has been based in the classics\u2014Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Haydn\u2014but this season he is barnstorming with a new, bespoke work: John Williams\u2019s jazzy piano concerto. \u201cAre … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7455,3907,4967,7073,6514,3610],"class_list":["post-17327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-artist-of-the-year","tag-award","tag-emanuel-ax","tag-musical-america","tag-pianist","tag-piano"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17327"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17339,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17327\/revisions\/17339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/17329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}