Víkingur Ólafsson plays Mozart

The Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is one of the outstanding artists of our time. He embodies a “rare combination of technical brilliance, controlled expressiveness and interpretative depth,” wrote the British magazine Phonograph, which named him Artist of the Year in 2019. Other awards include the 2022 Rolf Schock Prize and the Opus Klassik, which he received twice for the best solo recording; his Bach recording was also named Album of the Year at the BBC Music Magazine Awards. Other recordings are dedicated to works by Philip Glass, Claude Debussy, Jean-Philippe Rameau and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; the most recent album From Afar was released in October 2022. Víkingur Ólafsson’s recordings have received an excellent response and have been listened to more than 400 million times on streaming platforms. In the concert hall, he performs with the world’s leading orchestras – in the 2022/23 season alone, with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic and the Czech Philharmonic, among others. Víkingur Ólafsson not only knows how to convey music in an exciting and likeable way as a performer, he has also presented several television and radio programmes. During the Corona lockdown, he was also artist in residence on the BBC’s classical radio station, where he spent three months on the programme Front Row presenting music close to his heart to a worldwide audience from the empty Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik.