Emanuel Ax
Emanuel Ax Named Musical America Artist of the Year
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—Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Haydn—but this season he is barnstorming with a new, bespoke work: John Williams’s jazzy piano concerto.
“Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake?” asks Emanuel Ax, when told about his Musical America Artist of the Year award. Ax’s modesty is well known among friends and colleagues. Despite many honors, including multiple Grammy Awards, competition gold, and Lincoln Center’s prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, Manny Ax (everyone calls him that) is, as ever, a study in humility.
That unaffected quality pervades Ax’s musical approach as well. In his rendering of the standard repertoire, no egoistic quirks intrude on the musical flow. Chopin’s 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.
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 “balance, of not overdoing anything,” from his early teacher, the Polish virtuoso Mieczyslaw Munz. “I learned a lot about practice habits from him,” Ax says. “He believed in slow practice, practice in rhythms, and in getting things right. He didn’t analyze things harmonically, but rather focused on getting things to sound good.”
Hearing the great pianists at Carnegie Hall was as much of an education as his private lessons. “I’d hear a Horowitz or Richter and think, ‘That’s how I want to play it,’ then hear Rubinstein and think, “No, I want to play it like that!’ And so on. By the time you’ve absorbed it all you’re not really imitating, you’re grabbing hold of the inspiration, and hoping it becomes a part of you.”
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. “At Juilliard, I was majoring in ‘Cafeteria’—and Manny hung out there too.” Ma jokes.
“As the friendship grew deeper, we talked about large musical questions,” he continues. “Where, 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
piece of music, the part that gets an audience’s attention, is actually not the most important part.
We have a shared value system,” Ma says. “And at this point we’ve played together for so many years that we have a sixth sense of each other’s gestures, and of an inevitability in the way things will go.”
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. “I played the Brahms D minor Concerto,” Ax says. “Rubinstein asked me, ‘when you enter, why do you play so fast?’ I had my reasons. But then he added, ‘when my friend Joseph Joachim played…’ Of course I did what he said.
“I’ve 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, ‘Picture your Jewish grandmother sitting in the corner, and she goes, ‘Oy.’ [Orchestra theme continues] Da da da da da… ‘Oy.’ It’s so typical of Brahms: He gets to this ecstasy and then…‘Not so fast!”
Critics the world over recognized Ax’s 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 “fleet fingerwork” and the “logical balance between…quirkiness and maintaining an elegant flow.” Summing up, the newspaper deemed the performance “a masterclass.”
The pianist’s 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® Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s
piano sonatas. He has also made a series of GRAMMYwinning
recordings with Yo-Yo Ma
Ax’s most headline-grabbing recent adventure has been John Williams’s Piano Concerto, which the famed composer wrote it at his urging. “This was me being cheeky,” Ax says. “I met [Williams] over the years at Marlboro 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’s not that the music sounds like any of them, except in a couple of spots. But it was a way for him to start.”
The concerto had its world premiere at Tanglewood in summer 2025. Ax this year will play the work’s Boston Symphony subscription debut in January, and the New York premiere one month later with New York Philharmonic. “It was a lot of work, a lot of notes,” he admits. But certainly not too many for Emanuel Ax.