Emanuel Ax named Musical America Awards’ 2026 ‘Artist of the Year’

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.

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Mozart’s C-major Piano Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin

“As centrepiece, longtime musical comrades Emanuel Ax and Slatkin stylishly realised the Heaven-sent K503 through well-judged tempos, shapely and expressive phrasing, varieties of subtlety (Ax adding tasteful decoration in the Finale), with the SLS characterful in support, the composer’s intentions speaking directly through musicians whose rapport is self-evident. The first-movement cadenza was by Robert Casadesus (as advised by Mr Ax), and his encore was a Chopin Nocturne, the F-minor, Opus 55/1.”

Colin’s Column

The Strad Recommends: Leonidas Kavakos, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax: Beethoven for Three vol.4

The Strad

These players continue their ‘Beethoven for Three’ series of piano trios and symphony arrangements with the First Symphony, in which they catch all the freshness and exuberance of Shai Wosner’s arrangement, which has both the sensitivities of chamber music and the power of Beethoven’s big-boned tuttis.

There is delicacy and good humour in the Andante, before the jolly Menuetto and happy, bustling finale.

After the energetic opening of the ‘Ghost’ Trio op.70 no.1 there is leisurely melodic playing. The weaving chromatic lines of the development have an air of mystery and the coda has a dreamy expansiveness.

The Largo assai progresses with a sense of strange inevitability in its rise and fall of dynamics and later in its vivid drama, as the playing becomes more muscular and emphatic. There is a constant alternation of energetic joy and poetic sensitivity in the finale.

Kavakos takes over clarinet duties in the piano trio version of the Clarinet Trio op.11. The playing here is immaculately clean and lyrical, the staccatos clipped, the sforzandos punchy but tonally focused.

The Adagio is a delight, genial and relaxed, with finely sculpted string melodies neatly offset by Ax’s twinkling filigree playing. In the finale the second variation, for strings alone, has simple charm.

The musicians are captured in a warm and detailed recorded sound.