Admirers of Víkingur Ólafsson who were unable to get to his London recital should not feel too disappointed if they already own his latest disc, Mozart and his Contemporaries. The Queen Elizabeth Hall programme exactly replicated the repertoire and the running order on that disc, and even the three encores – Bach, Rameau and Debussy – seemed less like spontaneous, unbuttoned responses to the enthusiastic applause than reminders of Ólafsson’s previous two releases – devoted to Bach, Rameau and Debussy.
It felt a little too slickly packaged to allow us to understand more about what makes Ólafsson the musician really tick. There’s no doubt that technically he’s a fine pianist, with the crispest articulation and a pearly pure, if rather unvaried sound. Everything is where it should be; ornaments are never too flashy, inner parts perfectly defined. It’s all terribly well manicured.
The programme interleaved Mozart’s music with that of his immediate precursors – minor-key pieces by Galuppi, CPE Bach, Cimarosa and Haydn contrasting with mostly major-key Mozart in the first half, with the more intense minor-key music by Mozart kept back until the second. In introducing the recital, Ólafsson had spoken very convincingly about his personal relationship with Mozart’s music, and what it had meant to him since he was a child, but there was still something rather impersonal about at least the first half of his programme. Beginning with a movement from a Galuppi sonata in F minor and ending with Mozart’s C major Sonata K545, the sequence (played without a break) seemed a little too much like a rather undemanding 18th-century playlist.
The second half, which centred on Mozart’s rather Beethovenian Sonata in C minor, K457, had more sense of purpose and personality. It had begun with Ólafsson’s own arrangement of the Adagio third movement of the G minor String Quintet, K516, for which he switched to a Yamaha piano rather than the more assertive Steinway he played for the rest of his recital. It seemed a rather odd indulgence – there’s plenty more minor-key piano music by Mozart he did not play, not least the A minor Rondo, K511, one of his greatest keyboard works. And before ending with Liszt’s transcription of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, Ólafsson played the Adagio in B minor K540, finally giving a glimpse of the intense, personal playing you sense he really could produce.
