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The Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson gave a performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988 for the ages before an almost-packed house at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Wednesday night.
It was clear from his performance that the 40-year-old Ólafsson, looking, as ever, like the boy next door, has done a deep dive into the Variations. In October of 2023, he released a recording of the Variations and then dedicated all of 2023-2024 to a world tour performing them.
It was all business from the time Ólafsson sat down at the piano bench and gently brushed both hands across the entire keyboard before playing, almost imperceptibly, the first plaintive G major notes of the Aria that begins this monumental work. For the next one hour and 15 minutes, Ólafsson buried himself in what he later described as the most important work for keyboard ever composed. Throughout 30 variations on the theme in the Aria, Ólafsson took the audience on the musical ride of a lifetime through the genius of Bach and the Variations.
Ólafsson took most of the repeats in many of the variations quieter than the original themes, and in the only minor key variations (e.g., #s 15, 21, 25), as in the first Aria, the notes were almost painful, especially in #25, when Ólafsson made them seem as if a lonesome cry from a distance.
Bach, like composers of his day, did not include dynamic markings in his scores. That was probably because pieces like the Goldberg Variations were written for harpsichord for which dynamics were not really possible to create. Rather, dynamics were probably dictated by the structure of the piece. Because the Goldberg Variations contain so many different structures, it is really up to the performer whether or how to include dynamics. Ólafsson, unlike other performers of the Variations, uses dynamics freely. Purists might not like it, but the audience at WDCH certainly did, and so did this reviewer.
After his performance on Wednesday night and the rousing ovations that followed, during one of his curtain calls, Ólafsson tapped the piano. It wasn’t clear whether he was showing his approval of the WDCH Steinway or acknowledging Bach’s great work, or both. Either way, it was a noble gesture.
Ólafsson then returned to the stage with a microphone to tell the audience what this reviewer was thinking: one can’t really follow the Goldberg Variations with an encore. As he said, “What am I going to do, play a Liebesträume or a Chopin Nocturne?” But then, of course, he graced the audience with one encore: the Andante from Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 4, which is a staple encore for him. It was a fitting conclusion to a truly inspired night of Bach’s keyboard music.
If you ever get a chance to see Víkingur Ólafsson perform, don’t miss it. He’s not one of the flashy younger pianistic rock stars, but he’s one of the best!
—Henry Schlinger, Culture Spot LA
For information about upcoming concerts, visit www.laphil.com.
Photographs taken by Timothy Norris at Walt Disney Concert Hall, provided courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association