Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Grand Piano, Grander Pianists
Emanual Ax opens 2024 Van Cliburn concerts
If you’ve heard the name Emanuel Ax, it was probably in connection with his dear friend and cello legend Yo-Yo Ma. Or it might have been in performance with Edgar Meyer, Peter Serkin or the late Isaac Stern.
Ax is a legend, too, described by Benjamin Peled for Mount Dela as “unofficially … the nicest guy in classical music.” Born in 1949 to Holocaust survivors in what is today Lviv, Ukraine, Ax was raised in Winnipeg, Canada, studied at Juilliard, and burst onto the world music scene in 1974 when he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975 he won the Michaels Award for Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize. He’s got eight Grammy Awards — out of 19 nominations — and contributed to an International Emmy Award-winning BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
A Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987, Ax will open the 2024 Van Cliburn Concert Series April 10 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The series was inspired by the 2016 donation of a Steinway and Sons concert grand piano from the estate of Van Cliburn.
“Every work of art that we have tells a story,” Rod Bigelow, Crystal Bridges executive director and chief diversity & inclusion officer, said at the time of the donation. “Van’s story is one that is very American. I think we can tell new stories through a work like this, a piano. It is something that helps us begin new conversations and helps us explore new ways in which we interpret the American spirit and how we engage the community in a bit of a different way.”
According to a 2016 story in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Van Cliburn earned international fame in 1958 by winning the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow at the age of 23, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003, was awarded the Order of Friendship by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2004 and received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2011.
“The representation of the American spirit at Crystal Bridges was something that Van Cliburn cared very much about,” Bigelow said in 2016. “So I think this is a wonderful gift to signify both [donor and longtime partner Thomas] Smith’s excitement about the place as well as Van Cliburn’s passion for culture and the arts and America.”
“Music is important for life,” Ax told a German interviewer in 2019. “I just started, and I stuck to it; I liked it,” he said of playing the piano in a New York Times story in September 2023. “I think the sheer enjoyment of it is a talent in itself.”
Rounding out the 2024 series will be pianist Kenny Broberg and violinist Maria Loudenitch, performing July 26, and the Bax-Chung Duo on Sept. 5.