Icelandic piano superstar Vikingur Olafsson who has been on my radar for many years now, has won the 2021 Limelight Recording of the Year Award with his album ‘Mozart & Contemporaries’. This little essay is the outcome of my excitement with the news.
When the concerts of the 48th İstanbul Music Festival were cancelled last year in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Olafsson was the shining star of the only live event from the festival. If I remember it well, all other concerts were online. As a devoted follower of Olafsson on social media, I was surprised and very upset when I heard he was going to play live with BIFO (Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra) in İstanbul: ‘cause I was on holiday and was most afraid to take the plane to go back because of the pandemic. So I purchased my online ticket with the deep sadness of missing this live event. To my surpise Ola
fsson chose to play Mozart’s wonderful Piano Concerto No:23 (I was expecting him to play Bach). Another sad memory of mine is when many years ago he played the Goldberg Variations in my alma mater, the Bosphorus University, sold out before my attempt to purchase a ticket.
In this album, Vikingur, one of the musical wonders of Iceland along with my beloved Björk, recorded his favorite Mozart sonatas and other piano works from lesser known composers like Baldassare Galuppi and Domenico Cimarosa. In the album, most pieces from Mozart were selected in major-key contrasting the other composers’ works in minor-key. I was already mesmerized by Vikingur’s 2017 Philip Glass Etudes and 2018 Johann Sebastian Bach recordings and I say my favorite moments from the ‘Mozart & Contemporaries’ album are Cimarosa’s Sonata no.42 in D Minor (arranged by Olafsson) and Mozart’s Fantasia KV.397 in D Minor (I guess D Minor is my favorite key!). From one article on Vikingur, I remember a quote which goes like “Olafsson’s notes are as soft and pure as snowflakes falling quietly from the sky” and this is exactly what I feel when I hear him playing: notes clear, soft, lucid and bright like dew drops in the morning…
Another remark on Vikingur’s recordings: the piano sounds as natural as though he was playing in your living room, without much studio manipulation. So I say, dear Metalheads, listen to Vikingur Olafsson, one of the most remarkable young pianists of our time, who reached 10.4 million listeners and 65.3 million streams on Spotify…
As I told you many times previously in my Clubhouse broadcasts and on Metal Oda’s social media accounts, you are in Metal Oda and here, art and music from very different genres may pop up, my artistic interests being wide. For me, it was always classical music before metal and here on metaloda.com I’ll write often about classical music artists like Vikingur, who are near and dear to my heart.
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