Garrick Ohlsson | Musica Viva Australia
Monday 5 June from 7pm to 9pm Saturday 17 June from 2pm to 4pm
In 1970 Garrick Ohlsson – a gangly pianist from White Plains, New York, all of 22 and unknown beyond his hometown – pulled off an astonishing feat: from nowhere he won the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, the only American to have done so. He somehow missed the announcement, a kindly audience member informing him that his life would never be quite the same.
In the subsequent 50 years Ohlsson has owned Chopin’s music like few others, playing it with authority, humility, a sense of discovery and deep commitment.
Ohlsson has other heroes too. Scriabin is one such example, his powerful, impressionistic music an ideal match for Ohlsson’s authoritative playing. He adores Barber and Schubert, Debussy and Liszt too, choosing this Australian tour for his first performance of the latter’s Sonata in B Minor in many years. His program also features a new work by the Australian composer Thomas Misson.
"His performance was a marvel of virtuosity, and he played with Olympian serenity and equanimity, dispatching the most strenuous passages with apparent ease" — New York Review of Books