As talent goes, Víkingur Ólafsson is about as original as you can get. An award-winning recording artist with a string of cannily programmed albums, he’s also an in-demand concert artist with a repertoire from J.S. Bach to John Adams. It was a bold move to devote an entire year to a single work, but that’s what makes this insightful Icelandic pianist unique.
There are conventional pianists and unconventional pianists, and then there’s Víkingur Ólafsson. A string of original albums is testament to his individual way of programming, by coupling Debussy with Rameau, for instance, or looking at Mozart—who the Icelandic pianist describes as a late bloomer—through the lens of his 18th-century contemporaries. And then there’s the sheer chutzpah of an artist choosing to break out of the commercial hamster wheel and devote the entire 2023–24 season to a six-continent odyssey playing just one work: Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
Watch Víkingur Ólafsson's Musical America Awards interview
Ólafsson describes his year of magical thinking as “a workaholic’s sabbatical,” though watching him play in London it was clear that a lifetime’s preparation had gone into crafting each individual performance. To keep things fresh, he told me, he sometimes practiced by working backwards through the variations or shuffling the order. Different angles, he says, allow him to discover hidden facets.
“It’s a bit like Olympic gymnastics, because you are absolutely exposed in this music—as you are in Bach in general—more exposed than in any other keyboard music I know,” he explains. “It’s a matter of controlling the millimeters with your fingertips, and those millimeters, or half a millimeter, that’s what counts.” Born in Reykjavík, Ólafsson’s mother is a pianist and his father a composer and architect, but it wasn’t only the mighty Steinway filling the tiny basement flat that drew him in. It was the way music was talked about, its place in his parents’ lives and its deep significance to human existence. “I was raised Protestant, but music was the real religion in the house,” he laughs. “Becoming a musician was something elevated, something out of the ordinary. It was simply the most beautiful thing in the world.”
As a gifted pianist, Ólafsson moved to New York in 2002 for six years of eye-opening study at Juilliard (seeing Martha Argerich with Rostropovich conducting at Carnegie Hall was a life-changing experience). As a student, he was known as the kid who wouldn’t leave the practice room, toiling all hours to get 50 to 60 concertos under his belt. Over the next few years, he beavered away, playing even the smallest concert as if it were his Carnegie Hall debut. “The luxury I had was coming from this little country called Iceland, because even if I had nothing going internationally, I knew at home I could create my own existence in music,” he explains. “I had a TV show on music and a radio program. I had a festival, and I created my own record label.”
In 2011, Vladimir Ashkenazy invited Ólafsson to play the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra for the opening concert at Reykjavík’s new, state of the art concert hall. A few years later, Deutsche Grammophon saw him play the Goldberg Variations at a 200-seater concert in Berlin. Liking what they heard, his DG debut, an award-winning album of Philip Glass, was followed by an even more successful Bach album.
Yet despite being one of the most sought-after musicians on the planet, there remains something solitary about Ólafsson. The Goldbergs he describes as a pilgrimage; being on tour akin to being a monk. “More and more I’m a loner,” he admits. “I used to have seasons with 12 to 15 different concertos, but it’s hard to follow your vision in every single case. I think the music simply asks more. The older I get, and the less time I have, the more specific I want to be and the deeper I want to go.”
Having just turned 40, he’s relishing the future. “I want to define the next decade for myself,” he says. “It doesn’t matter that it has no meaning for anyone else, but it helps me structure my life.”
As we speak, Ólafsson is deep inside John Adams’s new piano concerto for a Zürich premiere in January 2025, as well as thinking up a duo program with Yuja Wang. All the while he’s mapping out future projects on disc. “I like to have a vision of five albums ahead,” he admits. “I’ll probably change my mind about one or two things, but I love the idea of trying to be in the micro and in the macro at the same time.”
Whether that’s Bach, Mozart, Glass, or Kurtág, his fans have learned to expect the unexpected. “That element of surprise has been important,” he says with a smile. “Putting Debussy and Rameau in the same room, for instance.”
It’s all part of the Ólafsson philosophy that Western classical music is still in the process of being formed. “The distance between Bach and the present is the blink of an eye,” he smiles. “Really, it’s just a few grandmothers.” •
Clive Paget is features editor for the Musical America Directory. A former editor of Australia’s Limelight, he writes and reviews for, among others, Musical America, The Guardian, and BBC Music Magazine. Prior to his move to Australia, he was a director and dramaturg developing new music theater projects for London’s National Theatre.
