Volume 27 Issue 3 - December 2021 / January 2022

ARI MAGG
Víkingur Ólafsson
Elsewhere, in the booklet notes to Ólafsson’s recent Bach album
(which won two BBC music awards including Record of the Year in
2019), he wrote: “We performers must weigh our knowledge of period
style against our individual and inescapably contemporary sensibility.”
When that’s acknowledged and accepted, he told Cullingford, “What’s
left is a liberating freedom. It’s like my manifesto. I really feel that. I
see all music as contemporary music, I don’t make a distinction. If we
play the music of Rameau today we play it, inevitably, so differently
from the way it has sounded before – certainly in his time, when he
had nothing close to the modern piano, and when the horse was the
fastest means of transport. But because we are reinventing the music,
obviously it is contemporary. It is new music.”
Ólafsson’s love of recording owes a unique debt to his Icelandic
childhood. “I think it has something to do with the fact that my
exposure to music was limited growing up here in the 1990s. It was
very different from how it is now, and it certainly wasn’t as easy to fly
abroad, either. If I were growing up right now my dad would probably
just fly me to London or wherever to see whatever I wanted to see.
But that wasn’t the case then, and so I became a huge CD collector.
And I didn’t do any competitions – that was very far away from my
mentality – and so I didn’t have any exposure to what students my
age were doing. I had no yardstick to measure myself against except
through recordings.”
Ólafsson’s parents instilled in him a sense of the profound value
of music, Cullingford writes. When he was born, they were living in
a tiny apartment in Berlin, making ends meet. But when they then
inherited some money, they chose to spend it on a Steinway. The piano
moved with them to Iceland, becoming a cherished and dominant
presence in their small basement flat.
As to why he chose to focus on the music of Mozart’s last decade?
“Simply because I think it shows us Mozart at his best,” Ólafsson
told Katherine Cooper. “There’s a reason why 85 or 90% of what we
hear in concert today by Mozart is from the 1780s. This last decade in
Mozart’s life is one of the most incredible decades in music history
for any composer, both on a personal and a musical level. In 1781 he
discovered the music of J.S. Bach – by accident almost, in a library in
Vienna – and his own music would never be the same. He was really
delving deeply into Bach study during this period, and you hear that
clearly on this album. And at the same time he was going through this
astonishing transformation from being the prodigy of all prodigies to
being a mature musician: by his mid-20s he no longer has that free
card of being the boy wonder, and he’s facing a lot of difficulties with
the musical establishment of his day. He wouldn’t bow down to the
pressures of the aristocracy; he always played his own game, and in a
certain sense he was a wild card as a person.”
Regional and community orchestras
Now that the TSO has made a triumphant return, it’s time to pivot
towards the GTA’s community orchestras. The Mississauga Symphony
Orchestra began their 50th season – and music director Denis
Mastromonaco’s eighth season – on November 20 with “A Triumphant
Return,” a program of orchestral favourites. The concert included
Autumn from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (concertmaster Corey
Gemmell, violin soloist), the fourth movement of Mendelssohn’s
“Reformation” symphony, Mozart’s Overture to the Marriage of Figaro
(Miranda Brant, guest conductor) and Beethoven’s iconic Symphony
No.5. It’s the first step leading to their 50th Anniversary Celebration
on June 4, 2022 – complete repertoire to be released shortly.
The Etobicoke Philharmonic Orchestra season opened on
November 5 – available to stream on YouTube via the orchestra’s
website – with a guided tour of the EPO led by music director Matthew
JOIN US ONLINE AND IN-PERSON
Carols by Candlelight
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 4:30 PM
Carol arrangements and original compositions by David Willcocks,
John Rutter, Randall Thompson, Geoffrey Bush and Malcom Sargent.
Nine Lessons & Carols
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 19, 4:30 PM
Carols by Mark Sirett, Healey Willan, Philip Ledger, Edgar Pettman,
Herbert Howells and William Walton.
Soloists & Section Leads of Yorkminster Park Baptist Church Choir,
William Maddox, conductor, Sharon L. Beckstead, organist
YORKMINSTER PARK BAPTIST CHURCH | 1585 Yonge Street | YorkminsterPark.com
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