Skip to main content

Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson: 'Everyone knows how to listen to music, just like we know how to drink water'

The Icelandic-born musician’s fresh approach to Bach has won him rave reviews and a record of the year award. Why is he now mixing the baroque composer with electronic music?

‘We’re in a golden age for classical music,” says Víkingur Ólafsson. Spend time in the 35-year-old’s musical company and you might well agree. His album, Bach, has just been named recording of the year in the BBC Music Magazine awards – no surprise given the five-star raves it received on its release in September. “Ravishing … a miracle of delicate control”, “Ólafsson’s Bach will quench your thirst”, “infectiously joyous energy… he is a remarkable musician” said the critics. The collection of 35 short pieces features original Bach works for keyboard interspersed with a variety of transcriptions that, from Stradal to Ólafsson himself via Kempff, Busoni, and Rachmaninov, traverse the last 150 years of Bach readings.

In a world hardly short of Bach recordings, his does feel genuinely revelatory. I’ve been listening to it daily for six months, and have pressed copies into the hands of friends and family with evangelistic zeal. How has Ólafsson found such a fresh and serene approach?

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2GSw6KA
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more