Mozart, the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson who emerged from the stage in Zankel Hall on Tuesday evening, was a ‘late bloomer’. The audience chuckled at the thought of one of history’s greatest child prodigies, dead at 35 and taking a long time to find his gifts.
It was the rare time I heard a laugh during a recital. Most musicians seem a little lost when you give them a microphone. Ólafsson grabs it by the base and manipulates it confidently, like a stand-up comedian: wry and self-deprecating.
At the age of 38, he has appeared little in New York, and never before in any of the spaces of Carnegie Hall. Many here have known him as an artist, an identity he embraced Tuesday, playing without any change – and, apart from a pause, without a pause, as if you were listening to the CD – the program of his most recent album, “Mozart and Contemporaries .”
His late bloomer commentary was a joke, but only partially — fitting for a concert that focused on Mozart’s artistic growth in the 1780s, his last full decade. Ólafsson’s goal was both to bring the master down to earth – alternating him with pieces from about the same time, in a similar style, by Haydn, CPE Bach, Domenico Cimarosa and Baldassare Galuppi – and to take him back to heaven. to elevate the audience in just 90 minutes of painful beauty.
Yes, there was some variety, but not that much. Ólafsson’s enemy here is the traditional piano recital, characterized by lively contrasts – of period, of mood. His touch is acute and pearly, his attack is barely muffled if warranted, and by no means all this music is slow or soft. Still, “Mozart and Contemporaries” came across as a continuous, unfolding, hypnotic broad, almost dreamy side of sound, inward-looking and wistful in both major and minor, andante and allegro.
For the listener – especially to the live version, the peaks and valleys are smoother than on the recording – the feeling eventually approached that of an insect encased in amber: surrounded by beauty, even trapped by it. So much loftiness is hard to take.
Which doesn’t mean it isn’t sublime – in the essayistic outbursts of a Bach rondo or in the wintery field longing of Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor (K. 397); the delicacy of K. 494 Rondo of that composer or the dash of another, K. 485; an alert rendition of Haydn’s B minor Sonata; intimate movements from Galuppi and Cimarosa; and a clear, sharp interpretation of Mozart’s “Sonata Facile” in C (K. 545).
Ólafsson’s clarity was ideal for the cheerfulness of Mozart’s less than two minutes of Mozart’s K. 574 Gigue – but he also brought out the subtly refined, world-encircling harmonies, the sense of limitation over an immense distance. (He said after the intermission that conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen told him this is a “cosmic” performance.)
The second half was dominated by three elaborate adagios, beginning with Ólafsson’s arrangement of the slow movement from the String Quintet in G minor (K. 516). A movement from Galuppi’s Sonata in C minor (which, like so much of Scarlatti, evokes the plucking of a Spanish guitar) led to the intensity of Mozart’s Sonata in the same key (K. 457) – the obsessive finale, the snow-globe tenderness of his adage. Then came the brooding, singing Adagio in B minor (K. 540), and Liszt’s pristine ivory transcription of the ‘Ave Verum Corpus’.
“It’s very difficult to play anything after ‘Ave Verum,'” said Ólafsson, who muffled the applause by returning to the piano bench. And then, with perfect timing, “But it’s not impossible.”
He did the slow movement from JS Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 4, resounding yet controlled, and exquisite.
Vikingur Ólafsson
Performed on Tuesday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan.