Even if you don’t recognize the name Víkingur Ólafsson, there’s a good chance you’ve heard his playing. In 2024, the Icelandic pianist achieved an extraordinary and (in the world of classical music) exceedingly rare feat: one billion total streams.
Ólafsson’s exquisite touch, probing phrasing, and flawless articulation have made him one of the world’s most in-demand classical performers. His curiosity and range — spanning Philip Glass and Debussy to Bach (his recording of the Goldberg Variations won the 2025 Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo) — is equally impressive.
On Thursday, March 19, Ólafsson performs a solo recital at Marian Anderson Hall as part of Ensemble Arts Philly’s Brodsky Star Spotlight Series, presenting a program of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert based on his most recent Deutsche Grammophon album, Opus 109.
In advance of his trip to Philadelphia, Ólafsson connected with WRTI over Zoom, from his home in Reykjavik. We talked about the mysteries of late Beethoven, how he experiences synesthesia, the power of Icelandic moss (yes, really!), and more. Watch our full conversation and find an edited transcript below.
Let's start with your recital. You’re playing a program based on your most recent album, which is centered around Beethoven's Opus 109 Sonata, paired with works by Bach and Schubert. How did you come up with the concept behind this program? What ties these pieces together?
These last three Beethoven sonatas — Op. 109, 110, and 111 — are almost always played together. That’s a great thing to do, and I was actually going to do it. But as I was preparing to record it for Deutsche Grammophon, I really started to wonder and ask myself if Op. 109 should necessarily always be the opener of an album or of a recital program. I think Op. 109 deserves to be a destination rather than a departure point.
So I started looking around, and wondering what would go with it and how I could create a little world around that incredible sonata. And I came up with this idea of having another Beethoven sonata from six years earlier, the E minor Sonata, Op. 90, and this completely neglected gem of a piece, the E minor Sonata of Franz Schubert. It's fascinating to think Schubert and Beethoven were living in the same city. Certainly young Schubert would have gotten hold of anything the master Beethoven published. In the second movement of Opus 90, you really hear, in my opinion, the seeds of Schubert.
I very much think that Op. 109 could not have been written without a piece like Bach’s Goldberg Variations. You have so many things that come from the Goldberg Variations in its third movement variations: an aria that is a sarabande in structure and the dramaturgical beauty that is the return of the aria at the end of the Variations. This is the only time in Beethoven’s life — he writes 40 or more variations — where he does this.
Having toured the Goldberg Variations for a year, I thought, why not pair Op. 109 with Bach? And since I found myself in the keys of E major and E minor, I picked up the Sixth Partita, my favorite partita of Bach, the most monumental suite he ever wrote. It's an incredible work and I do think it changes the way I hear the pieces that came later.
In promotional videos for this album, you said two things that really struck me. The first is something your mother told you: she said that you have to “feel Beethoven in your stomach when you play him.” The second is something that you said: “There are multiple answers to all the questions in late Beethoven.” Taken together, it seems that you're suggesting that you have to both feel Beethoven in your gut, but also always be searching. Am I wrong to conflate these ideas?
No, you are so right. And I love the way you framed that. Going to my mother’s remark, when you play Beethoven, you are in his world. When you go through these sonatas, these incredible whirlwinds of emotion and human drama, you’re going on his journey on his terms. Where, when you play Bach, in contrast, he invites you very much to discover you.
Beethoven grabs you and he really holds you. If there is a measure in Beethoven’s music that doesn't have significant tension one way or another, point it out to me, because I don’t know it. Even the most tranquil music of Beethoven has yearning, tense drama to it. He's never quite at ease and when he wants to be at ease, he’s not really at ease. You can always feel it, you know? He's not a carefree guy. When you play those sonatas you get to be a guest in his immense psychological world.
So is each performance trying out a new answer to those questions, or do you eventually settle on a set of answers and attempt them over and over?
I just played this recital in Paris, Brussels, Rome, and Barcelona, and those were four totally different concerts. You are having a dialogue with yourself and however you’re feeling that day, but you’re also having a dialogue with that specific audience, and with that specific instrument that’s on stage with you — 12,000 parts of metal and wood that is itself in so much dialogue with temperature and humidity. Even 1% up or down the piano feels it, and the pianist feels it. In that sense, we are like the princess that’s sleeping on the bean. If you know that fairytale, you feel every little nuance, every change. You’re also having a dialogue with a hall, a dialogue with the architecture.
And so you’re having all those dialogues at the same time, and you’re certainly having a dialogue with Beethoven. I mean, that’s the most important dialogue. That’s a meeting that takes place sort of over time and space through the centuries. It’s the only form of time travel that I know to work, to be honest with you. That conversation with Beethoven changes every night. So I do play it totally differently. If people listen to the album a lot and then they expect to hear the album in the live concert, I don’t want that to happen. I want them to hear something new in the concert.
You experience synesthesia — you associate specific colors with specific pitches. For example, E is green; C is white; D is brown; and F is blue. When did you first discover that this is something you were experiencing? How does it manifest?
It is very funny. Oddly enough, my first piano teacher had synesthesia. I remember when I was six or seven talking about the music in those terms, talking about F being blue or D being brown. I remember her saying, no, but F is not blue, F is red. Don’t you hear that? And that was the strangest sort of conversation because she might as well have told me that the grass is not green, that the grass is red or yellow or purple.
Everyone who has this condition has their own color map. I think it’s actually quite spectacular, but I can totally understand how weird it must sound if you don’t have it. But to me it’s just pure logic. It’s just a neural connection that’s formed at some point in your early development. Perhaps I was hearing my mother teach the piano at home, a piece in E major or E minor — who knows, I was looking at a picture of a frog or something and maybe that connection between memorizing the pitch and the color formed. Nobody really knows the answer, but it’s a fascinating little mystery.
Two years ago you achieved an amazing feat: your recordings collectively achieved a billion streams, and since then, I’m sure millions more have been added. This is rare territory for a classical artist. What is it like knowing that at any given moment, people around the world are listening to your music? Is connecting with people via streaming something you think about when you approach recording and performance?
I have to say it’s a little bit surreal. Unreal, even, that you can play Carnegie Hall for 3,000 people and, at the same time, during those two hours on Spotify you will have had maybe a hundred thousand people listening to you. That’s a weird thing. I don’t quite understand it yet, but what I do take from it is that never before in history have so many people been listening to the music that we love. And we have to be grateful for that. It’s interesting to be able to see it so concretely. Coming from Iceland, a country of 400,000 people, and never having imagined any of this, it’s just something to be immensely grateful for. The music is so relevant today: we burn for it, you know? I’m playing it, you’re communicating it. We have to remember, with all the doom and gloom of the world, that the music is doing well.
You just mentioned Iceland, and the visual language of your album incorporates Iceland. We're talking on St. Patrick’s Day — I’m wearing green, green is the color of E, which is the color you associate with the album, and the album’s cover is a closeup of your face lying down on bright green moss. How did you come up with that concept? What inspired that location?
It’s so funny, people love to discuss this cover and they love it or love to hate it.
I love it. I think it’s great.
I thought it was so funny. I was like, wow, people really, really hate me. But actually the moss is a timeless thing and it manages to bloom so incredibly beautifully on this lava field. It grows on the most impossible surface. And in that sense, I thought with Beethoven and all of his roughness to have this poetry that he brought to the world, I saw a little connection there.
The texture to the moss felt fun to play with. I thought, why not listen to the moss? That’s what I’m doing, you know; I’m not sleeping there. I’m actually listening to the message of the moss. It’s just a little playful thing. In classical music, many people don’t want you to do a playful cover like that. They don’t want you to have the confidence to take that space. So I learned that. It’s also just very nice to be in Iceland, because the country has so many angles that are wonderful to work with, and this is just one of them.
Maybe we can finish there. I’ve never been to Iceland but it’s very high on my list of places to visit. What’s one thing that tourists do in Iceland that you think is overrated, and what’s one activity or destination in Iceland that you think is totally underrated that you’d recommend?
The tourist trap is the Blue Lagoon. I went there recently and I thought it was so overcrowded and I just didn’t enjoy it at all. Having said that, it’s the most important destination in Iceland, and it’s quite arrogant of me to actually say this, because people come from there and they somehow seem like their lives have been changed. So obviously I still recommend it, but for whatever reason, it’s not for me.
I think the most underrated thing is to go off the beaten track. The country is huge — it’s like the size of England, but we are only 400,000 people. So you have to go hiking and just find that space where you are completely alone with nature. There aren’t many countries that I know of that have that in the abundance that you have in Iceland. Bring your good clothes. It can be windy here, but you don’t really come for the weather. You come for the atmosphere.
Wonderful. Safe travels to Philadelphia. We’ll see you very soon.
See you in Philadelphia. I can’t wait. It’s gonna be fun.
Víkingur Ólafsson performs at Marian Anderson Hall on March 19 at 7:30 p.m.
