Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess.
Although long regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire, which ranges over the entire piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Mr. Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. To date, he has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century, the most recent being “Oceans Apart” by Justin Dello Joio commissioned for him by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and now available on Bridge Recordings. Also just released on Reference Recordings is the complete Beethoven concerti with Sir Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra.
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Mandel Concert Hall
Photo: Erik Drost
Cleveland, OH, United States
Grant Park Music Festival
Photo: Sea Cow
Chicago, IL, United States
First Presbyterian Church of Skaneateles, Skaneateles Festival
Photo: Paul Malo
Skaneateles, NY, United States
Robinson Pavilion at Anyela’s Vineyards, Skaneateles Festival
Photo: Paul Malo
Skaneateles, NY, United States
On July 16, Garrick Ohlsson plays with the Cleveland Orchestra once again, this time led by Semyon Bychkov. He will play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which will be preceded by Smetana’s The Moldau from Má vlast, and followed by Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8. He will then perform at Grant Park Music Festival on August 5. The evening will start with Juan Pablo…
On June 26, Garrick Ohlsson returns to the Brevard Music Center to perform one of his signature concertos, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, considered by many as one of the most beautiful of the composer’s works. The evening will open with Anna Clyne’s Masquerade, a single-movement orchestral composition that had its premiere in London in 2013. After the intermission, the…
On May 29 and 30, Garrick Ohlsson returns to Prague to perform with the Warsaw Philharmonic for their last concerts of the season. He will play Karol Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 4, one of the most important works in his oeuvre. Szymanowski’s musical language, having previously gone through various phases of aesthetic inspiration, attains in this piece a certain stability and restraint.…
The Pianist: Conversations with Ohlsson is both an autobiography in interviews and a record of a life in music, including photographs and musical examples.
Conversations with the greatest pianists of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries is a new book series of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute. Garrick Ohlsson is the main character of the first book in the series, authored by Kamila Stępień-Kutera, who has an impressive resume in music theory and Polish philology, and a PhD from the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The Pianist:…
Ohlsson... gave this lengthy solo all its virtuosic edge, rolling through the many diminished seventh chords with dramatic flair and ending with florid trills.
“Ohlsson brought out the intimate characteristics of the piano writing, playing the many runs with distinct clarity in his still-agile fingers. In the development, where the keyboard mostly accompanies important lines in the orchestra, Ohlsson tended to move ahead, rather than yielding to what was happening around him. For the cadenza near the end of the first movement, Ohlsson played the…