Pianist Emanuel Ax, a frequent and treasured performer in San Francisco, has been named the 2026 Musical America Artist of the Year, recognizing his distinguished half-century career.
“Emanuel Ax, at age 76, combines the pianistic insight of an old master with the freshness and modesty of a newcomer,” writes Musical America. “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.”
Other major winners in Musical America’s 65th annual awards are Gabriela Lena Frank as Composer of the Year, Jakub Hruša as Conductor of the Year, Gerald Finley as Vocalist of the Year, and Martha Gilmer as Impresario of the Year.
A Grammy-winner, Avery Fisher Prize recipient, and Arthur Rubinstein Competition winner, Ax is next scheduled to appear with the San Francisco Symphony from Jan. 29-31 as the soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K.503, with conductor Jaap van Zweden. His last SF Symphony appearance was in March, 2025, as the soloist in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
Ax is among musical greats with Ukrainian heritage, including Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Michael Tilson Thomas, many others.
Born into a Polish-Jewish family of Nazi concentration camp survivors in Lviv, Ukraine, Ax started studying the piano at age 6. Soon after, the family moved to Warsaw, Poland then to Winnipeg, Canada. Ax was 12 when the family moved to New York City, where he later attended the Juilliard School.
Ax became an American citizen in 1970. In the same year, he won honorable mention at the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, followed by many honors in international competitions
In 1974, Ax rose to fame when he won the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and was praised by Rubinstein himself, who was a judge for the competition.
Among his notable Bay Area appearances, Ax performed in Stanford’s Bing Hall, with Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma in transcriptions of symphonic works, and with the Philharmonia Baroque.
A highlight among Ax’s SF Symphony appearances was his contribution to the celebration of MTT’s 70th birthday in 2015 — he performed Franz Liszt’s 1837 Hexameron for Six Pianos and Orchestra (Variations on the March from I Puritani) along with Jeremy Denk, Marc-André Hamelin, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Yuja Wang.
Phil Grabsky’s film, In Search of Beethoven, brought Ax together in collaboration with Gianandrea Noseda, Sir Roger Norrington, Riccardo Chailly, Claudio Abbado, Fabio Luisi, Frans Brüggen, Ronald Brautigam, Hélène Grimaud, Vadim Repin, Janine Jansen, Paul Lewis, and Lars Vogt.
In an interview with SF Classical Voice, Ax said, “Musicians are just normal people who try their best to do a difficult job. In a funny way, we may be the last group of people that is directly responsible for something. Sports people and us!
“If a tennis player loses his match, it’s his fault — there’s nobody else. If I play a bad performance, it’s my fault. It’s not my boss, just me. It’s not someone who forgot to send me a piece of paper, it’s just me. I think there’s a lot of responsibility involved. So we try very hard.”
