The Freedom of Change

As Cal Performances’ 2025–26 Artist in Residence, the pianist from Iceland invites audiences into an ever-evolving dialogue between past and present.

By Thomas May, Cal Performances-commissioned writer, critic, educator, and translator

“You should always try to escape your own success,” Víkingur Ólafsson says. “Because that success so easily turns against you and limits you and your choices and what you want to do next.”

At 41, Ólafsson, who is Cal Performances’ Artist in Residence for the 2025–26 season, has already carved out a career of extraordinary prominence and individuality in the classical music world. By the end of 2024, his recordings had amassed more than one billion streams, and his recent album of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations (on Deutsche Grammophon) earned him the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo—a notable milestone in a field crowded with interpretations as hotly debated as they are revered.

The last pianist to win a Grammy for this work was no less than Glenn Gould, honored posthumously in 1983 for his famous second studio recording of the Goldbergs. In temperament and interpretive style, Ólafsson stands worlds apart—yet ever since the New York Times dubbed him “the Icelandic Glenn Gould,” the comparison persistently resurfaces.

“Víkingur is a formidable pianist, which of course is the baseline for anyone who has a career as an international piano soloist,” says Jeremy Geffen, Executive and Artistic Director of Cal Performances. “But there is also a brutal, uncompromising honesty about the way he understands his own playing. He possesses an extraordinary capacity to express his ideas exactly in the way that he envisions them.”

For all this acclaim, Ólafsson has made a quiet art of eluding the potential traps of success—and thereby continuing to surprise music-lovers. “It’s dangerous to get celebrated for anything, because then everybody wants to steer you only in that one direction,” he observes. “You need to avoid getting pinned down.”

Though Ólafsson only made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 2022 and first performed at UC Berkeley last year—one of the astonishing 88 destinations on his global Goldbergs tour—Bay Area audiences have had a front-row seat to a musical journey shaped by omnivorous curiosity and a fierce imperative to change. This past January, he appeared with the San Francisco Symphony for the world premiere of John Adams’ After the Fall, composed expressly for him. Ólafsson also pivoted at a moment’s notice from his duo program with fellow star pianist Yuja Wang, originally scheduled at Davies Hall in April, to a solo performance of the Goldbergs (when Wang had to withdraw due to injury).

For his Cal Performances residency, Ólafsson returns to UC Berkeley for two orchestral concerts with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali (October 18–19, Zellerbach Hall [ZH]) and, in the spring, a solo recital built around Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 109, the first of the composer’s final three sonatas for the piano (April 29, ZH). Each offers a different lens on the pianist’s artistic range—from large-scale virtuosity to intimate introspection.

The Architecture of a Recital
Originally, Ólafsson had planned to follow up his Goldberg Variations tour with a single album encompassing all three of Beethoven’s final piano sonatas (Opus 109, 110, and 111). “But the more I worked on them, the more I wondered: Does it really make sense to program them together? Even if it’s almost a rite of passage and countless pianists have done that before me?”

He came to see the trilogy not as a single arc, but as “three absolutely different universes,” each deserving its own context. “Perhaps it would be more interesting to examine what makes those pieces unique rather than what makes them connected,” he reflects. “In my opinion, there are more things that make them unique.”

That line of thinking is emblematic of Ólafsson’s programming philosophy. Here, you can sense his resistance to received wisdom, as well as his drive to reframe even the most hallowed repertoire on his own terms. It’s an approach he pursued on his 2021 album Mozart & Contemporaries, which juxtaposed rarely heard works by Galuppi, Cimarosa, and C.P.E. Bach alongside Mozart to illuminate surprising affinities and departures.

In the case of his April 2026 recital program with Cal Performances, Ólafsson plans to explore what he calls “the road to Opus 109” by tracing the musical and historical lineages that converge in Beethoven’s sonata from 1820. His long-term intention is to do the same for the composer’s last two sonatas as well, shaping a distinct recital program and album around each work.

“What is Opus 109? Where is Beethoven coming from with this piece?” he asks. Ólafsson’s quest for answers led to a kind of temporal dialogue that considers Beethoven’s experimentation in the two-movement Op. 90 from 1814 as a vital precursor. Along the way, he makes a case for an overlooked work by Schubert—his Sonata in E minor (D. 566), written in 1817 at age 20—as a direct response to Beethoven’s Op. 90. Though often assumed to be fragmentary—and, when it is performed, sometimes combined with unrelated pieces to round out a conventional four-movement structure—the sonata, Ólafsson believes, is modeled on the older composer’s innovative two-movement design. “To me, it feels like a sister or a brother piece to Beethoven’s,” he says. “There’s nothing unfinished about it.”

And then there is the inevitable presence of Bach. “These three sonatas form the conceptual spine of the program. But both composers are grappling with Bach”—as, in Ólafsson’s view, every great composer must. Opus 109 culminates in one of Beethoven’s most radiant variation movements, which he is convinced shows the inspiration of the Goldberg Variations. As his main examples, he points to the triple-meter rhythmic pattern of the sarabande (originally a dance form) that shapes Bach’s Aria and Beethoven’s theme, the fugal textures and double trills, and the simple but meaningful cyclical return at the end of the journey.

Following his deep immersion in the Goldberg Variations, Ólafsson now has a different understanding of “the presence of Bach in Beethoven’s late works.” He also includes Bach’s monumental Partita No. 6 in E minor on this recital program: “I think it adds something else to the way we hear Beethoven and Schubert, just as I think Beethoven and Schubert add something to Bach as well. You have three different eras meeting there. Some of it is very Classical. Much of it is progressive and Romantic, with what I see—in my fantasy world—as the birth of Schubert in Beethoven’s Op. 90. But the roots all lie in the Baroque period with Bach.”

Collaborative Forces
Beethoven is also on the agenda in the first of Ólafsson’s two orchestral programs at Cal Performances in October. He joins forces with London’s famed Philharmonia Orchestra and Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, making his Berkeley debut, for the Emperor Piano Concerto No. 5, on a bill that also includes Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 and the Bay Area premiere of a new work by acclaimed Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz.

While the Emperor, which Beethoven composed amid the onslaught of Napoleon’s occupation of Vienna, is among the most frequently performed piano concertos in the repertoire, Ólafsson approaches it with the same critical questioning he applies to other conventions, such as the habit of presenting the composer’s final three piano sonatas as a unified cycle.

“Very often it’s a good idea, when you see something that’s frequently done, to ask yourself: Are we doing it out of convention, or is this really the best way of presenting it?” he remarks. “It’s not trying to do things differently just for the sake of being different. But the older you are, the more specific you feel about your vision. There are plenty of things in the Emperor that are victims of convention. And there’s nothing conventional about any piece Beethoven ever wrote. He was always going against convention himself. So, we should look for that same spirit.”

He continues: “I’m not saying to make anything up or add anything that’s not there. But, sometimes, the greatest scope for originality and freedom to be yourself can be found in those pieces that are most often performed. It seems like a paradox, but the more they’re performed, the more they suffer the same fate—which is to be approached somewhat automatically.” All the more reason to strive to evoke the fresh vitality of music like the Emperor concerto, “even if it’s been played so many times.”

It’s a task he looks forward to undertaking with the Philharmonia, with whom Ólafsson is collaborating this season as a featured artist. He first performed with the storied ensemble in 2016 in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and fondly recalls a program of Bach and Mozart concertos at the 2021 Proms, “when the world was just opening up again” following the COVID-19 shutdown.

Enhancing the prospect of their partnership is his admiration of Santtu-Matias Rouvali—“one of the most dynamic conductors I’ve ever worked with.” Rouvali’s conducting feels like a natural match: “He’s a man of the moment and anything can happen in concerts with him. Santtu gives you a lot of freedom to do spontaneous things. And his baton technique is beautiful, like a ballet dancer.” Most of all, “Santtu understands the orchestra as well as some of the master composers. He knows how to blend, how to make the orchestra sound colorful and unique.”

That chemistry finds another outlet on these artists’ second program, when Ólafsson turns to Maurice Ravel’s beloved, jazz-tinged Concerto in G major. Also on the program are Sibelius’ stirring tone poem Finlandia—a defiant musical emblem of resistance—and Shostakovich’s politically charged Symphony No. 5. Ravel’s kaleidoscopic colors, mercurial shifts in mood, and crystalline transparency pose a very different kind of challenge from the Emperor. Presented so close together, these two concertos promise to be revealing in how they showcase different facets of Ólafsson’s pianism.

“The Ravel and Beethoven Emperor are both standard repertoire works, but they require completely different types of imagination,” Geffen remarks. “In the Emperor, the balance is equally split between the orchestra and the soloist, if not slightly more on the side of the orchestra. Many passages have the soloist supporting what’s happening in the orchestra, rather than the other way around. Ravel’s Concerto in G is, by contrast, much more a work of chamber music, with super virtuosic parts from soloists in the orchestra as well.” Overall, Geffen characterizes Ólafsson as “the Don Draper of soloists, in the sense that there is something enigmatic about him, something that is unknowable because he’s so put together as a human being. He can calculate what he wants, but he’s also able to be spontaneous and humane—that’s such a difficult balance.”

A Cultural In-Between
“The extraordinary thing about Víkingur is that he has such a wide bandwidth of expressive possibility,” according to John Adams. “His Rameau and Bach and Mozart have incredible delicacy, and at the same time he can make the piano sound huge without banging it.” He adds that he “tried to incorporate that awareness into After the Fall,” a concerto that embeds Ólafsson’s special relationship with Bach into its own musical journey by weaving an improvisation on the C minor Prelude from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier into its final section.

Adams had first become aware of Ólafsson through his recordings, but the pianist was already drawn to the American composer when he was a teenager in Reykjavík. Raised in an artistic household—his mother a piano teacher, his father a composer, architect, and poet passionate about Adams’ music—Ólafsson remembers eagerly listening to the latest recordings of his works. When he later visited Adams at his home in Berkeley, he recognized a deep affinity between his homeland and California.

“I’m not surprised John chose to live in the Bay Area,” he says. “When I think California, I think freedom. It is somehow free from the past, from tradition, from convention. I feel the same back home in Iceland. The good thing about where I come from is that it is part of Europe, but it’s closer to North America. It takes cultural influence from both but stands in between. I’m interested in how ideas can come from different directions and create a unique sense of cohesion.”

This perspective is, for Ólafsson, inseparable from his attraction to composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Adams. Despite the differences in chronology and style, he sees in all three a shared instinct for transformation, for drawing on tradition and reshaping it into new, unprecedented visions. “They don’t just do one thing,” he says. “They stay open to vastly different things. I think that takes real confidence and courage—something we see all too rarely these days in music.”

This sense of being “in between”—between musical eras, geographies, idioms—is central to Ólafsson’s artistic identity. It helps explain his abiding connection to Bach, whose music, he says, distills the legacy of the past “into an incredible arsenal of composition.” Bach, too, remains for him an inexhaustible wellspring of possibility and a “vehicle for new invention” conveying “seeds for the future.” Ólafsson believes that Adams similarly uses Bach to look back over music history and “ponder the truly important question: is there still scope to create? There certainly is.”

Becoming the Music
For Ólafsson, performance should be neither a ritualistic presentation nor a pursuit of novelty, but a state of being, of presence. “When you play music on the piano, you have to become the music.” He compares the process to what happens when an actor takes on a role. “You can always tell who is merely acting the role and who becomes the role. The great actors never just act their role. In the same way, you should never act Beethoven, just putting on ‘the Beethoven show.’ You have to become the music. You become the message of the eternally beautiful song of the slow movement of the Emperor Concerto.”

To Ólafsson, this transcends the model of incessant practice in order to present a particular version of a piece to the audience. “In the greatest performances I’ve experienced, I’ve always felt that the conductor or the singer or the pianist ceases to be performing anything; they just become the material.”

That ideal of transformation carries forward from his recording of the Goldberg Variations and resonates with performers he especially admires from the past: Vladimir Horowitz, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benno Moiseiwitsch…. “When you listen to Rachmaninoff play Chopin, it’s very much Chopin, but it’s also very much Rachmaninoff. This beautiful meeting place between them is uniquely theirs.”

The result is an approach to authenticity that goes beyond literalistic fidelity—but it is an attitude that has fallen out of favor in the last 60 or 70 years, Ólafsson notes. “The reigning idea has been that you are the humble servant of the score. But if you go to the other side of the score, you understand that musical notation is just the beginning of the beginning. It’s impossible to notate poetry and magic in the moment.”

“Víkingur has the gift of being able to make you rethink your own biases,” says Geffen. “Even those who didn’t agree with his Goldberg Variations respected his approach, because he takes risks.”

Revelation rather than rebellion is the goal. “I love the score and spend a lot of time with it, but you can’t say the score has the truth,” Ólafsson insists. “The truth goes beyond the score. The truth is before the score.”

Leadership support for the 2025–26 Víkingur Ólafsson residency at Cal Performances is provided by Michael P. N. A. Hormel.