Piano greats Vikingur Olafsson and Grigory Sokolov release new albums from top shelf
Two of classical music’s most brilliant and interesting pianists have albums out which look set to compete for the best of the year awards.
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Two of classical music’s most brilliant and interesting pianists have albums out which look set to compete for the best of the year awards.
Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson is no stranger to winning gongs – his exceptional survey of some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s lesser known works and arrangements picked up a swag of them last year. And any record release by Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov is an event. The 70-year-old refuses to go into a studio and his albums are live performances, sometimes drawn from several concerts.
What both virtuosos have in common is meticulous attention to programming – how one piece or even composer complements another, and how all these musical jigsaw pieces fit together.
At 35 Olafsson, with his peerless technique and questing artistic intelligence, has established himself as a leading figure in what he describes as a “new golden age” in classical music. His albums on the Deutsche Grammophon label are eagerly awaited by critics and music lovers and he is equally at home with his online audience as he is with the concertgoer.
His latest release marries works by two seemingly disparate composers – Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) and Claude Debussy (1862-1918) – and the result is a revelatory 79 minutes which highlight the workings of two minds that revolutionised harmony and structure, changing the face of music of their times. Debussy’s respect for the Baroque master is evident in his piano works, and his Hommage a Rameau forms a fitting closing piece on this disc.
DREAMY
The other Debussy pieces, interspersed with excerpts from some of Rameau’s finest works, are drawn from the Preludes, Images and Children’s Corner and the program starts with Debussy’s own piano transcription of the dreamy prelude from his cantata La Damoiselle elue.
The pivotal moment of this album is when Olafsson’s own transcription of an interlude from Rameau’s last opera, Les Boreades – which his gives the name The Arts And The Hours – transitions seamlessly to Debussy’s serenely beautiful Girl With The Flaxen Hair.
If Olafsson is a musical genius for the information age, the enigmatic and poetic Sokolov is the complete opposite. He came to prominence in the Soviet era by winning a gold medal in the Tchaikovsky piano competition in 1966 and made a few studio recordings in the 1990s, but since then has preferred live performances. He won’t travel outside of Europe, usually arriving at recitals by train or road (he has a photographic memory for transport timetables and for all the model numbers of the hundreds of pianos he has performed on!) Sometimes he dismantles and reassembles the piano he will be playing on that night.
His repertoire is mainstream for the most part – Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert included – but like Olafsson he shares a love for Rameau and the Baroque.
If this set isn’t enough to show you why Sokolov is considered one of the greatest living pianists, the second disc should convince you
His concerts are noted for his generous encores, and they feature prominently on his latest two disc set – also on the Yellow Label – of Beethoven and Brahms, taken from three separate concerts.
The first disc is all-Beethoven – an early sonata, the No 3 in C major, which mixes classical elegance with the passion of the young Romantic – and the gemlike 11 Bagatelles from the Op 119 set, written near the end of the composer’s life. If this half of the set isn’t enough to show you why Sokolov is considered one of the greatest living pianists, the second disc should convince you.
He takes us through Brahms’s final piano works – the six Op 118 and four Op 119 pieces written four years before he died and which he believed would be his farewell to music.
Often described as “autumnal”, they contain some of the greatest piano poetry in the repertoire and Sokolov is alive to every nuance.
The cream on the cake of this marvellous double disc is the collection of seven encores from the three concerts, with works from Schubert, Rachmaninov, Brahms, Debussy and Rameau all given the magical Sokolov treatment.
You can get Olafsson’s Debussy-Rameau for $19.95 and Sokolov’s Beethoven and Brahms with Mozart DVD for $44.95 at Classicsdirect.com.au.