THIS IS THE SEVENTH OF OUR BEST OF 23 REVIEW OF INTERVIEWS: Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson released his album Mozart & Contemporaries on September 3, 2021. He predominantly performs works written by Mozart, but sprinkles in works by Haydn, C.P.E. Bach and lesser-known composers such as Baldassare Galuppi and Domenico Cimarosa. It’s a passionately curated collection of music.
On May 7th, Ólafsson will begin the final performances of this album at the Symphony Center in Chicago. This is followed by three additional performances in San Francisco (May 9th), Los Angeles (May 10th) and Santa Barbara (May 11th). He does not intend to perform this program again anywhere in the world.
A week before Ólafsson calls it a wrap on this project, we spoke about this program, his passion for Mozart and Bach and whether music being written today will be rediscovered the way he rediscovered Galuppi’s Piano Sonata No. 9 in F Minor or Cimarosa’s Sonata No. 55 in A Minor for Mozart & Contemporaries.
What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.
In these final four concerts you will play an entire album from start to finish and ask the audience not to applaud. As if they are listening to the album live in front of them. What’s the logic behind that and how has your relationship to this work that was released almost two years ago evolved since that time?
At this point, I don’t think of it as Mozart and Contemporaries, but rather Wolfie and Co. I love this program and those are actually the very last concerts I will ever play this anywhere. It’s just the end of a big project for me I’ve played throughout the whole world. The idea with the programing and the way it works from the first piece to the last, I ask people to go into this state of mind with me and allow one piece to speak to the other and merge into the next; melt together almost. It’s because I love to think of my albums and recital programs as a kind of a collage.
I’ve actually never in my life played an album like that from beginning to end without changing anything. When I was doing my Bach album, my Rameau album, my other albums, I’m usually playing one half the album with some sort of a compilation I create, and then I’ll do something completely different in the second half. But the Mozart, one I tried that. I couldn’t find what to erase from this program. It is really going from lights into the shadow. There’s a lot of playfulness and a playful exchange between Mozart and the other composers in the first part of the program. Then as it progresses, it gets darker and darker and more and more difficult, but also more romantic and denser and in a way greater.
You talk about how it gets darker and darker, but when you get to Liszt transcription of the Ave verum corpus at the end, it’s just heavenly.
These are maybe the greatest 3 minutes ever composed. Mozart wrote this in an afternoon for a friend who was celebrating Corpus Christi somewhere in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Austria. He just threw it together in one afternoon. The funny thing about Mozart is that he was always so annoyed when people claimed that he had a divine sort of talent. He always maintained that he worked harder than everybody else. And that is true. Consensus said that he probably killed himself with overwork. But at the same time, however much you choose to work or spend time on your art, you can’t just then write Ave verum corpus once you passed your 100,000 hours. It doesn’t happen like that. That’s what makes Mozart Mozart.
31 years ago when you were tackling the Sonata in C Major at the age of eight, I have a feeling you didn’t quite think of him in such high regard.
I had a troubled relationship with Mozart. As I did with Bach, which is very funny because those are my two favorite composers to play. I still think they’re the most difficult ones to play, but maybe that’s why I love them and maybe that’s why I hated them when I was eight. [Mozart] was the first composer that made me realize that nothing is good enough from the piano when you play music with that status at that level. Any nuance has to almost match the nuance of the composition. That is, in itself, just an impossible task. You just can’t expect to reach that height of piano playing. No one will. But that’s somehow what Mozart seems to demand.
If you could go back in time or if you could bring to present day Mozart and Bach, what would you most want to know about why they wrote the way they did or about their work or who they were?
Good question. It’s an impossible question, of course. First of all, I would just try to go and hear them play. Hopefully the same music on two consecutive nights to get confirmation for what I’m absolutely certain is true. That they would never repeat themselves and play, let’s say the Goldberg Variations, twice the same or the same mindset. I’m not just talking about ornamentation or little things like that. I’m talking about actual tempos. I’m talking about phrasing and dynamics and the detail within the detail.
Second of all, I would just go up to them and ask them, How can I help you? Can I do your laundry? Do you need money? Can I just do something for you? Because those guys, they didn’t enjoy what they should have enjoyed in their life. They had a very difficult life when they had to work more than we probably understand and comprehend today.
I would probably also ask Mozart what he wanted from his instrument because the instrument was changing so much. I feel in the C Minor Sonata, which is the biggest keyboard sonata and one of the biggest pieces he ever wrote in a way keyboard, I would ask him, are you content with the instrument? He seems to me to be, in the late works, pushing the boundaries of the instrument of the piano or whatever his instrument was at his disposal. He’s pushing it so far. I’d love his thoughts about the pros and cons of the piano of the day and how he would ideally have the piano developed.
If I would be back in Bach’s day, I would like to hear him play on the harpsichord. I would really want to hear him play the organ and hear how he would register the organ just to get a sense for his colors and what he would be going for. Then I would go back in the time machine and travel to 2023 and maybe try to recreate some of that on the on the piano, because I think the piano has that potential. But if I could bring a piano with me back in time to those guys, I think that would be the best present they would ever receive without being able to say that. But I think they would love the potential of it, the polyphony in the way you can differentiate the different voices.
On Mozart and Contemporaries I love that you introduce us to composers we probably have never heard of before. As somebody who believes that we’re in a golden age of classical music, do you think that in 100 or 200 years from now, some of the music that might get discarded presently can be rediscovered and will be rediscovered?
There’s sadly so much music being written today that deserves a platform that doesn’t get it for very different reasons. But that could be said about almost anything in the world presently, because we have never had anything like the kind of prosperity that we have today. Never before have so many people been able to do something that actually interests them out of passion. We’re not having a golden age only for classical music, but in terms of humanity the fact that people can develop, devote their time to doing something beautiful by necessity.
But a lot of that is unfortunately going to be forgotten and never heard. And that’s going to be difficult for people to admit. Things are probably going to be even more crowded or prosperous. So to have any time or any reason to seek out unknown people from the 21st century? I don’t know. It’s sort of sad, but it’s also very beautiful, because the process is, in the end, what matters.
In 2017, you did a rapid fire interview for for a Deutsche Gramophone’s YouTube channel. You were asked to choose between original and remix. Your answer was original. Now you have other artists who are taking your work from From Afar and they are now reworking it. Has your perspective changed on original versus remix?
I think that I like to do the remakes myself. Even as a pianist, you’re kind of remixing if you’re an interpretive musician and you take your thing seriously. Rachmaninoff played Chopin – he’s effectively remixing it. It changes everything almost in the dynamics and he does it so freely. So if you just take it on a sort of broader scale, we are all remixers here in the classical world.
But I think I’ve come to appreciate this process of reversing the creative process, my creative process, which is to take the works of others and try to lend them my meaning and connect with my world and my experiences and bring that to the audience. Then to take art to the studio and then to actually take that and give that material to the composer. It’s basically reversing the creative process. Giving them my recordings or just prolonging the chain of creativity. It’s very interesting. It’s a little bit humbling for me to to do it because you have to just let loose and let go of your creations, which are my recordings, which are very dear to me and matter to me very much. That’s an interesting process for me. I can experiment in letting go of my ego.
I feel like this is the 21st century answer to transcriptions.
Yeah, you could say that. Usually it’s people that I’m taken with one way or another. It’s something about them that strikes me as interesting and brilliant. We’ve just had two new reworks released just in the last weeks: an amazingly beautiful lullaby by Icelandic singer Álfheiður Erla Guðmundsdóttir. She’s just written a lullaby with an Icelandic text for her young newborn son on top of material from Brahms’s Intermezzo Opus 116, Number Four, which is my favorite intermezzo. It’s my recording from my From Afar album. I think it’s magically beautiful. I’m absolutely in love with it. Of course, I’m very fortunate that anyone has an interest to do something like this with my material. So I’m going to continue with it.
A lot of people are eagerly anticipating your Goldberg Variations which I believe is coming down the pike sometime in the not-too-distant future. We’ve already talked about how important Bach is to you. He was asked about playing a musical instrument and he said, “There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right moment. The instrument plays itself.” That strikes me as a gross oversimplification of playing music, but is there any part of what Bach said that you could agree with, or is there truly something remarkable about playing music that you would say in response to him?
You have to remember this is the greatest composer in the history of music. So for him the comparison between what I do, which is to play the music, and what he also did, which is to write the music and come up with the St. Matthew Passion. I can agree with him that in comparison what I do is pretty feeble. It’s not incredible, actually. Having said that, I actually think some of my favorite musicians of today are not necessarily composers, but rather some of the greatest performers alive who can bring new life to the music. Which can be more original than a new composition by a composer who doesn’t have a strikingly interesting point of view.
I agree with Bach. In his case that’s true. I love people who manage to bring something here and now. I would be interested to hear if this was actually what Bach thought. Of course, it would have been difficult to be him because he also suffered from lack of recognition. Here is history’s greatest, not even composer, I think greatest artist, everyone included, in my opinion. And yet he only had about four books published in his whole lifetime. He didn’t have any money. Much of his writing that we have is all about complaining about lack of salary or something like that. Who knows, maybe he had an off day. But I also believe he’s right. Compare those two facets of his life. Playing the music is nothing compared to writing it in his case.
I must say that some of my favorite performers in history approached the music from a composer’s standpoint. They’re so free with the music because they almost go to the source of most of the music. Seems to me that they almost understand how the music came to be and can then recreate it as if they had almost composed it. Rachmaninoff playing Chopin. This, I think, is the most authentic Chopin you can hear. But it’s also the one that strays, for the most part, furthest away from the score in terms of dynamics, in terms of so many things. He’s not afraid of changing things. He recomposed it like a rework almost, but it’s still so authentic. But it is a meeting between Rachmaninoff and Chopin.
Ask John Adams or Thomas Adés if they always predicted everything. I don’t think the answer is going to be yes. I think that composer can very well not be aware of certain things about the music. The music has its own life somehow. It’s just like your children. I think for composers,you know your child better than everybody. You created it. It’s in your DNA. But the child still has facets that you don’t know and that will always be the case.
To see the full interview with Víkingur Ólafsson, please go here.
All photos of Víkingur Ólafsson: ©Ari Magg/Courtesy Harrison Parrott