For my 61st birthday – how strange it is, to write those words – my wife took me to Iceland. There is a longer account of my trip coming, with travel advice as well as “what we did”. Our main objective was to see the northern lights, and we succeeded spectacularly. A story for another post.
By happy accident, we had to move our trip up a week from my birthday, and I discovered that a pianist I love, Víkingur Ólafsson, would be playing at Harpa during our visit. And he would be playing the Goldberg Variations, one of the summits of the piano repertoire.
Now, Harpa is a magnificent building, and in my previous two trips to Iceland, I had somehow managed not to visit it. And Víkingur Ólafsson is a world-class pianist, the Deutsche Gramaphone Artist of the Year for 2019, and he happens to be Icelandic. And I would later learn that the date of the concert, February 14th, happened to be his 40th birthday. All in all the omens were favorable. I scrambled to get tickets – the event was nearly sold out – but I succeeded in getting nosebleed seats (the second to last row of the enormous main hall).
Harpa is a magnificent building. The lobby interior is vast and surrounded by crystalline glass structures lit with a slowly rotating color, blue being the most predominant. There is a restaurant downstairs, which we did not try (favoring Fjallkonen for dinner), and as well there is a jazz club on the top floor, which, sadly, we did not have the chance to visit. One can take the elevator or climb the stairs as we did, making our way nearly to the top, slowly, taking too many pictures as we went.
As we wait, I listen to the crowd. They are mostly Icelandic, judging from the conversation and the clothing. But here and there, I hear a smattering of English and German, and some guests appeared to be from Asia. (I saw many more Asian tourists than I expected, in both our hotel and out and about). Finally, the doors open, and I hustle to my seat to get some shots of the concert hall before people crowd the hall.
It is a bit like being in the Imperial Senate in Star Wars. The room is dramatic, and very steep. A mild vertigo starts for me. I never had issues with vertigo until I went to the Guggenheim in New York City. Now I feel a faint discomfort when in steep, open balcony seating. But I master that and head up to the edge to take some photos.
The room is oddly smoky, as if a rock concert is about to break out. There are neon red striped lights surrounding the stage, and a jagged orange strip light running through the floor of the stage, surely intended to evoke a lava flow. The lights changed periodically during the show, very unusual for classical performances.
Soon it’s time, and a tall, trim, bespectacled man takes the stage. He is dapper, wearing a modern-cut, medium-blue suit. He looks like an earnest graduate student, not one of the most brilliant pianists in the world.
The Theme and Variations is one of the canonical forms of classical music. A theme is played, then developed in repeated in variations, usually alternating between fast and slow, happy and sad. The Goldberg Variations are one of the most difficult and beautiful pieces of the piano repertoire, consisting of a theme and 30 variations. Perhaps the best-known recordings are by Glenn Gould, who famously recorded the piece twice, once as a young man and once not that long before he died.
The theme opens with a crystalline singing, with simple lines and chords. Writing descriptively about a musical performance is always difficult, but let me start by simply saying that Ólafsson’s performance was astounding. His rendering of the Goldberg was over 75 minutes in duration. He of course played this without any breaks and without any score to guide him, it was all from memory. I do not believe that during that entire performance, I heard anything like a mistake. His tone was absolutely beautiful, and even during the most frenetic parts of the piece, his sound had total clarity. Every note was audible, even when buried inside a chord. Every phrase had total conviction and a deeply felt intent. Glenn Gould was famous for bringing out the “inside lines”, the melodies lurking in the lower registers and not the highest pitch. Ólafsson has a similar ability. Even my wife, who knows classical music but doesn’t listen to it much, remarked on that aspect of his playing.
I recently had a chance to hear Helene Grimaud in Boston. She is also a world-famous pianist and justifiably so. But I must say that Olaffson’s playing affected me more deeply and had much greater tonal clarity and precision. And I enjoyed her concert very much – I am not attempting to denigrate her playing at all, simply to give some perspective on how elevated this particular performance felt to me. Even at his fastest playing, it seemed clear that Ólafsson had another gear we did not hear.
I saw John Williams, the guitarist, some time ago in Boston. My friend Lynn remarked that during a particularly difficult passage, Williams seemed to have grown an extra finger. During one of the most frenetic variations, I thought Ólafsson had grown an extra hand. It just did not seem possible, what I was hearing.
Visually, he was intriguing to watch. He did not have as many quirky mannerisms as some pianists do, but he did perform the occasional self-conducting (ala Glenn Gould) when he was playing a single, slow-paced melody. Occasionally, during meditative sections, his head would sink, nearly touching the keyboard. Ólafsson’s technique was impeccable and visually interesting. Of particular note was his constant hand-crossing, playing blistering scales at a frenetic pace, where his left hand played rising scales while the right hand crossed over to play a melody below, both in pitch and on the keyboard.
The auditorium acoustics were wonderful. We heard complete clarity, even in the next-to-last row. With the lights down, it was almost like a meditation session, as the music surrounded us for almost 80 minutes in a long continuous stream. I confess, I almost nodded off once, but in a good way :()
Variation 29’s frenetic pace and associated technique faded to Variation 30’s stately, quiet chorale-like structure, then to the reprise of the quiet, calm opening theme. The room was silent for a good 20-30 seconds – whether in appreciation, in unsureness of whether he was done, or just a desire not to break the spell, I cannot say. The last reason for me.
Then cheers and bravos broke out. The hometown crowd brought him back for bows four times. After the last, he spoke for a few moments in Icelandic. There was frequent laughter from the crowd. Very much a hometown crowd. Then he left, and the lights came up. The show was over. The usual bring-back-the-artist-to-play encores was not to be.
I asked my concert neighbors to my left, clearly Icelandic, what he had said. For a change, one of the two, the man, seemed uncomfortable answering in English (most Icelanders I have attempted conversation with have impeccable English). The woman said, “He said something like, after this, there can be no encore.” Her translation was imprecise, but I certainly took her to mean not that he was tired, but rather that he held the piece in such high regard he did not wish to break the spell of it. We had no complaints.
If you are interested in any of this, you can listen to Ólafsson’s recording of the Goldberg Variations on Spotify.
He has also written in-depth thoughts on the piece, which you can read here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/06/vikingur-olafsson-pianist-on-bach-goldberg-variations
In case my review sounds over-enthusiastic, here are two others, including his recent Carnegie Hall performance.
Lastly, there is an excellent interview between Ólafsson and the Glenn Gould Foundation to be found here.
A happy accident indeed!