Víkingur Ólafsson

Born in Reykjavík in 1984, the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson was taught at an early age by his mother, a piano teacher, and subsequently continued his training in his native country with Erla Stefánsdóttir and Péter Máté. He was a student of Robert McDonald and Jerome Lowenthal at the Juilliard School in New York. Víkingur Ólafsson has collaborated with numerous contemporary composers ever since he launched his career, including Philip Glass, whose piano works appear on an album he released in 2017. This recording initiated his collaboration with the Deutsche Grammophon label, for which he has since made two Bach recordings as well, a Debussy-Rameau CD, the Mozart & Contemporaries project, and the album From Afar, which is inspired by childhood memories and his encounter with György Kurtág. His most recent release, which appeared in the fall of 2023, is an interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that was awarded the Opus Klassik. Víkingur Ólafsson has collaborated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He has performed John Adams’s piano concerto Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? with the Berlin Philharmonic; Ravel’s Concerto in G with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, Orchestra dell’Accademia nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and New York Philharmonic; Mozart’s C minor Concerto with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal; and the Schumann Concerto with the Czech Philharmonic. In the 2023-24 season, he has been focusing exclusively on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which he performed in many cities around the globe. Víkingur Ólafsson hosts his own television and radio programs. He received the Rolf Schock Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in 2022 and, in 2023, the Nordic Person of the Year Award from the Confederation of Scandinavian Societies (CoScan).

Lucerne Festival debut on 23 November 2019 with a recital that encompassed works by Bach and Beethoven.

March 2024