Viva Musica! festival 2019
VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON

Event description

VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON
Pictures at an Exhibition
A Piano Virtuoso from Iceland

He has collaborated with Philip Glass and Björk and records exclusively for the Deutsche Grammophon label. The New York Times described him as “an Icelandic Glenn Gould”. Thanks to the rare combination of passionate musicality, bravura virtuosity and intellectual curiosity, the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, a graduate of prestigious Juilliard School, is undoubtedly one of the most inspirational artists of the present day. With Deutsche Grammophon he issued the albums Philip Glass: Piano Works (2016) and Johann Sebastian Bach: Solo Piano Works (2018), for which he received the BBC Music Magazine Awards in both ‘Album of the Year’ and ‘Best Instrumental Album’ categories. One of the tracks from the album (Fugue in A minor, BWV 904) was included by the New York Times in its list of “Top 25 Classical Music Tracks of 2018”. In the current season Víkingur will perform in concert with Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Hollywood Bowl, and in further concerts in USA, South America, Japan, Sweden; he will also perform in the Berlin Philharmonic, London’s Royal Albert Hall, and the Philharmonie de Paris. Apart from a number of present-day composers whose works he has premiered, he has also collaborated with the Icelandic singer Björk. He is the artistic director of the Vinterfest festival in Sweden and the renowned Reykjavík Midsummer Music festival, of which he is also the founder. In Slovakia he will perform for the first time on August 16, 2019 at the Viva Musica! festival.

www.vivamusica.sk
FB event

This project has been supported using public funds provided by Slovak Arts Council.