Carries the whiff of a hotel-lounge pianist: Vikingur Olafsson’s From Afar reviewed

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Samuel Gregg

The welcome fall of Klaus Schwab

The 38-year-old Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson has an almost unique ability to make counterpoint sing, as his astonishing 2018 Bach recital for DG revealed. But his Proms debut last year in Mozart’s Piano Concerto K491 seemed over-thought, verging on the fussy. Now he’s been allowed the luxury of a concept double album, From Afar, in which he plays an eccentrically curated mixture of small pieces twice, once on a Steinway grand and once on an upright.

It’s a revelation, though not perhaps the one Olafsson intended. He says the two instruments call for different approaches to his menu of Bach transcriptions, Schumann, Brahms and snippets of Bartok, Kurtag and Adès. That’s true, of course, but what I also hear is that his playing – which, surprisingly for an intellectual of the keyboard, sometimes carries the whiff of a hotel lounge – has been liberated by the humble upright. Without the Model D upholstery Olafsson’s rubato is more spontaneous; basically he just gets on with playing the music. The smaller piano, fitted with extra felt dampening, is less uniform in touch and more three-dimensional in tone. Kurtag’s pedal-dominated reworking of Bach’s ‘Christe, du Lamm Gottes’ floats rather than drowns. The chorale sings out. Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’ sounds less like Lang Lang and more like Horowitz.

But the real test is Schumann’s ‘Vogel als Prophet’. Playing in a confined space on the upright, Olafsson sticks closer to the score’s dynamic markings. As a result, Schumann’s prophet-bird is clothed in feathers, not Steinway steel, and to hear it take flight is a glorious thing. Avoid the first CD and prepare to be enchanted by the second.