Víkingur Ólafsson, piano

It will not surprise fans of the probing, insightful pianist Víkingur Ólafsson that his newest project goes deep. Previously, he devoted an entire season of performances to Bach’s Goldberg Variations—playing the cycle for 88 concerts in total, including at Cal Performances in May 2024—because, in his words, “I wanted to know how deeply I can dive into a composition and how many different facets I can discover in it.” He won a Grammy Award this year for his sterling recording of that work.

Here, Ólafsson has designed a program exploring the first of Beethoven’s great final piano sonata trilogy, Op. 109, in depth. He presents this masterpiece in the context of the composer’s formal breakthrough in his earlier Op. 90 sonata and of Beethoven’s ongoing fascination with the legacy of J.S. Bach. Beethoven’s profound influence on his younger contemporary Schubert is still another thread of the program: the rarely performed Sonata in E minor, which Schubert wrote when he was only 20, shows his awareness of Beethoven’s innovative two-movement Op. 90.

Ólafsson describes the recital as “a road to Opus 109.… Some of [the music] is very Classical. Much of it is progressive and Romantic, but the roots all lie in the Baroque period with Bach.”

(Please note, Ólafsson’s highly anticipated new recording, Opus 109—featuring music from this program by Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert—was released by Deutsche Grammophon on November 21, 2025.)

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

This performance is made possible in part by Jeffrey Mackie-Mason and Janet Netz.