Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson believes that all classical music is contemporary

The last six months have marked a banner period for Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. He learned that he had achieved a billion streams, with 100 million alone attributed to his 2023 recording of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations on Deutsche Grammophon. And in February, that disc won a Grammy Award, in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo.

In January, Ólafsson performed the world premiere with the San Francisco Symphony of the piano concerto After the Fall, which John Adams had written for him. “He’s really one of the very great composers of our time,” Ólafsson told San Francisco Classical Voice. “He sent me the notes about nine months ago, I played through it, and I immediately recognized myself in it. It felt like coming home, but to a home I’ve never been to before. It’s like going to the tailor and having something gorgeous bespoke made for you. He’s actually brought something to this concerto that will really take people by surprise, and one of the people who pays a visit during the piece is good old Johann Sebastian Bach, for whom we both share a fascination and sense of love.”

Bach will be back on the program when Ólafsson performs in an SCP Piano recital on June 8, along with works by Beethoven and Schubert.

“Last season I performed the Goldberg Variations almost a hundred times all over the world. I got to know myself through that process and I got to witness the unique power of Bach’s message on people of different cultures," he said in an interview posted on deutschegrammophon.com. “It was a life-changing experience for which I will always be grateful. Winning a Grammy Award for my album of the Goldbergs is something very special which I can’t quite put into words.” 

But for Ólafsson, whose repertoire stretches deep into the Baroque, all music is contemporary. ’‘It’s like my manifesto. I really feel that," he said in an interview with Gramophone magazine. “I see all music as contemporary music, I don’t make a distinction. If we play the music of Rameau today, we play it inevitably so differently from the way it has sounded before — certainly in his time, when he had nothing close to the modern piano, and when the horse was the fastest means of transport. But because we are reinventing the music, obviously it is contemporary. It is new music.”

That applies to the Goldberg Variations, which Ólafsson has dreamed of recording for 25 years. Ólafsson devoted his entire 2023/34 season to the work. As it has been the case for many pianists, it was Glenn Gould who introduced him to the  Goldbergs. “I have to be very honest and say it’s the typical answer," he said in an interview with the site Your Classical. "The early Glenn Gould recording from 1955. I got that from my mother, who was a piano teacher, when I was 14, and it sort of blew my mind in so many different ways and changed the way I think about Bach.

“Before that, in my upbringing, I had seen Bach as a little bit strict and academic, and he was used in my musical upbringing to teach me good manners. You know, play evenly with both hands, not too much pedal, perfect control over dynamics, Then I heard the Goldberg Variations with Gould, and it’s so full of youth and freshness.

"I realized in an instant that Bach could be the great entertainer or that great virtuoso. He could be the philosopher, and he could be the musical architect. He could be serious and not serious at the same time. And everything could co-exist in Bach.”

As for his streaming success, he said, "I’m surprised because I’m not  playing crossover things much, I’m playing the Goldberg Variations, or the new John Adams concerto, or the late Beethoven sonatas, things like that," he said in another interview with Gramophone. But for Bach and for classical music, it’s really, really good news. And I’m not the only one who is streaming really well in classical music.

"To think that the Goldberg Variations were written for essentially a nobody, for a count who wanted to fall asleep, and for Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who was a 14-year-old student of Bach. Then you see the work having something like close to 100 million streams in one year from my album alone, plus, all the other Goldberg Variations albums, and you get a number that Bach would not have believed. I wish he would have been able to see it. I think it’s a golden age for classical music, but we’re just not noticing it."