As he stated years ago, Emanuel Ax prefers concerts to competitions. Although he took part in numerous piano competitions in his youth, he decided to consistently refuse to serve on competition juries, as he was terrified of having to eliminate participants. He comes from a Jewish family with Polish roots. He was born in Lviv, and attended his first music school on Miodowa Street in Warsaw, before continuing his studies at the famous Juilliard School in New York. He has received multiple Grammy awards, including alongside Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma. He returns to Warsaw with Ludwig van Beethoven’s last, monumental and groundbreaking Piano Concerto. This work earned the nickname ‘Emperor’ in unclear circumstances, but – in the words of Donald Francis Tovey – to the composer’s ‘profound if posthumous disgust’. The Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major was written in 1809, at a difficult time of conflict between Austria and France, and occupied a special place in Beethoven’s oeuvre; commentators have discerned in the work not only a truly imperial character, but also an apotheosis of musical military symbolism.
Almost a century later, Franz Schreker’s Schwanensang for mixed choir and orchestra to words by the librettist and poet Dora Leen, who died in Auschwitz, was premiered in Vienna. And in 1911 Grzegorz Fitelberg presented Warsaw audiences with ‘a work, the like of which had never been written by any Pole’, as its author Karol Szymanowski modestly said of his Symphony No. 2 – the pinnacle achievement of his youth.
