From Afar seems on its face like a dream recording for audiophiles and music lovers. The 2-CD, 44-track project spotlights Víkingur Ólafsson, the sensitive, 38-year-old Icelandic pianist, performing a captivating program of short pieces twice on dissimilar pianos with very different sound: a concert grand and an upright. The very different performances are dictated by Ólafsson’s response to these very different instruments. The contrasts are wondrous.
The recordings are unusual, miked so close that it’s easy to hear keys and pedals depressed and released. We hear harmonics very clearly, plus a surfeit of musically extraneous lower-midrange/upper-bass body. Don’t tune your system to this recording, lest others sound disappointingly lean.
The program, which begins with music by J.S. Bach, was inspired by a two-hour in-person exchange between Ólafsson and Hungarian composer György Kurtág, who at the time was 95 years old. The meeting took place, at Kurtág’s request, in September 2021, while Ólafsson was visiting Budapest.
Both performance and program are extraordinary. Ólafsson begins with Kurtág’s piano arrangement of J.S. Bach’s “Christe, du Lamm Gottes” (Christ, Thou Lamb of God), BWV 619, for organ (performed here on the two pianos). His touch is supremely soft and sensitive, bespeaking total focus and commitment. No matter what he plays, he sounds as though he’s reconsidering each note, with devotion and care.
From Bach, we proceed to the excited hush of Robert Schumann’s Study in Canonic Form; the warm, cushioned beauty of Ólafsson’s arrangement of Bach’s Adagio from Sonata No.3 for solo violin; then Kurtág’s short “Harmonica.” The latter performance lasts but a minute—44 seconds on the upright!—but it startles because Kurtág’s different and succinct aesthetic sounds surprisingly like an extension of the centuries-old aesthetics that precede it on the program.
EDITOR’S PICK
RECORDING OF THE MONTH
VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON
From Afar
Víkingur Ólafsson, grand and upright pianos
DG 4861681 (24/192 WAV, available on 2 CD, 2 LP).
2022. Christopher Tarnow, prod. & eng.
PERFORMANCE
SONICS
Thus is the pattern set. Three touching Hungarian folk song settings by Bartók lead to Brahms’s Intermezzo in E Major, Op.116/4, then another piece by Kurtág. (There are seven pieces by Kurtág among 22 pieces in the program.) In Ólafsson’s hands, each note of the Brahms blossoms like a new petal on a flower, joining others to open in full bloom. Ólafsson’s unwavering focus causes us to listen so carefully that when a Kurtág composition concludes each grouping, it impresses again and again as a continuation of the same classical canon.
The programming is brilliant.
With the 10th selection, Snorri Sigfús Birgisson’s arrangement of the Icelandic folk song “Where Life and Death May Dwell,” Ólafsson’s journey assumes meta-physical proportions. When we arrive at his arrangement of Sigvaldi Kaldalóns’s setting of “Ave Maria,”
