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Stories   >   Vikingur Olafsson - Mozart & Contemporaries makes NPR's 'Top 10 Classical Albums of 2021'

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Vikingur Olafsson - Mozart & Contemporaries makes NPR's 'Top 10 Classical Albums of 2021'

Posted: December 8, 2021
NPR's Tom Huizenga writes......The opening lines of Franz Schubert's song "An die Musik," his love letter to music from 1817, speaks of personal troubles, of being "caught in life's unruly round," and how the power of music can "lift you to a better world." Those sentiments have been hitting very close to the bone for many of us over the last year or so. Most of the albums on the list below were made while the pandemic was raging. And while musicians were largely sidelined from concert halls, many of them braved the recording studio and released perhaps the most meaningful albums of their lives. Musicians can't stop making music. Music lovers can't stop listening.
 
These 10 albums, presented here in unranked order, are my personal An die Musik. I found great beauty in the voices of Emily D'Angelo and Lise Davidsen, delighted in the ecstatic moments within Julius Eastman's Femenine, trembled in the face of Sofia Gubaidulina's mammoth symphonic forces and found comfort in the symmetry of a Mozart sonata and the sweet collaboration between Toumani Diabaté's kora and the London Symphony Orchestra. They lifted me to a better place. I hope they do the same for you.  For Those Who Like: clever pianists, Glenn Gould, mixtapes
 
The Story: The thoughtful 37-year-old pianist, who has been called "Iceland's Glenn Gould," seemingly can do no wrong. The Gould comparison is flawed, but Víkingur Ólafsson does possess a big brain and staggering technical chops. His playing is a singular combination of warmth and transparency displayed on four terrific albums on the venerable Deutsche Grammophon label.
 
The Music: Here, Ólafsson wants to alter your attitude about Mozart. To dispel the image of the composer as giggling savant (as in the movie Amadeus), Ólafsson places some of Mozart's more experimental (Kleine Gigue) and dark (Sonata No. 14) music beside that of his contemporaries. The result is to hear Mozart afresh. Even popular pieces, like the so-called "Easy Sonata," sound newly minted mixed in with C.P.E. Bach's quirky Rondo in D or Ólafsson's own arrangement of Domenico Cimarosa's languid Sonata No. 55. The pianist not only has the smarts to re-frame old music in modern ways, he plays it all beautifully.
 
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