Within two weeks of starting piano at the age of 8, playing was all Garrick Ohlsson wanted to do. “I wasn’t practicing,” he said, speaking from the Tanglewood Festival in western Massachusetts. “It was play. It was something I wanted to do, something I was good at. Success excited me.”
“Ohlsson to sample from his vast repertoire”16 Aug 2017
Youthful enthusiasm led to an international career that, after 50 years, shows no sign of fading.
Ohlsson returns to the Grand Teton Music Festival for four nights of performances, including a solo recital tonight and performances of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 9 on Friday and Saturday, the closing weekend for the Festival Orchestra, with Music Director Donald Runnicles conducting.
“We have mutual friends,” he said of Runnicles. “We had met socially several times and then worked together in the U.S. and Europe.”
Two summers ago, Denis Kozhukhin was slated to perform Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Festival Orchestra, but he ran into visa problems. Not many people can at a moment’s notice fill in to play the notoriously virtuosic piece. Fortunately Runnicles knew one of them: Ohlsson, who has at his command some 80 concertos.