Garrick Ohlsson

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. Although long regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire, which ranges over the entire piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. To date, he has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century, many commissioned for him. In the 2018-2019 season, he launched an ambitious project, spread over two seasons, exploring the complete solo piano works of Brahms in four different programs. The cycle will be heard in New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Los Angeles, London and a number of cities across North America, culminating in Tanglewood, summer 2020. In concerto repertoire ranging from Mozart and Beethoven to Brahms and Barber, he will return to the Nashville, Oregon, Dallas, Detroit and Colorado Symphonies, concluding the 2019-2020 season in Bellingham Festival of Music with all Beethoven concerti programmed over the course of three performances. Internationally, he can be heard with orchestras in Seoul, Helsinki, Zagreb, Tallinn, Manchester and London.

A frequent guest with the orchestras in Australia, Ohlsson has recently visited Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart, as well as the New Zealand Symphony in Wellington and Auckland. In February 2020, he will embark on a seven-city recital tour across Australia.  An avid chamber musician, Ohlsson has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Tokyo and Takacs string quartets, including, most recently, Boston Chamber Players on tour in Europe. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based FOG Trio. Passionate about singing and singers, Ohlsson has appeared in recital with such legendary artists as Magda Olivero, Jessye Norman and Ewa Podleś.

Ohlsson can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG , Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Hyperion and Virgin Classics labels. His ten-disc set of the complete Beethoven Sonatas, for Bridge Records, has garnered critical acclaim, including a GRAMMY® for Vol. 3. His recording of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 with the Atlanta Symphony and Robert Spano was released in 2011. In the fall of 2008, the English label Hyperion re-released his 16-disc set of the Complete Works of Chopin followed, in 2010, by all the Brahms piano variations, “Goyescas” by Enrique Granados and music of Charles Tomlinson Griffes. Most recently on that label are Scriabin’s Complete Poèmes, Smetana Czech Dances, and ètudes by Debussy, Bartok and Prokofiev. The latest CDs in his ongoing association with Bridge Records are the Complete Scriabin Sonatas, “Close Connections,” a recital of 20^th-Century pieces, and two CDs of works by Liszt. In recognition of the Chopin bicentenary in 2010, Ohlsson was featured in a documentary “The Art of Chopin,” co-produced by Polish, French, British and Chinese television stations. Most recently, both Brahms concerti and Tchaikovsky’s second piano concerto were released on live performance recordings with the Melbourne and Sydney Symphonies on their own recording labels, and Ohlsson was featured on Dvorak’s piano concerto in the Czech Philharmonic’s recordings of the composer’s complete symphonies and concertos, released July of 2014, on the Decca label.

A native of White Plains, New York, Garrick Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of eight, at the Westchester Conservatory of Music; at 13, he entered The Juilliard School, in New York City. His musical development has been influenced in completely different ways by a succession of distinguished teachers, most notably Claudio Arrau, Olga Barabini, Tom Lishman, Sascha Gorodnitzki, Rosina Lhévinne and Irma Wolpe. Although he won First Prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and the 1968 Montréal Piano Competition, it was his 1970 triumph at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where he won the Gold Medal (and remains the single American to have done so), that brought him worldwide recognition as one of the finest pianists of his generation. Since then, he has made nearly a dozen tours of Poland, where he retains immense personal popularity. Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the 2014 recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music, and in August 2018, the Polish Deputy Culture Minister awarded him with the Gloria Artis Gold Medal for cultural merit. He is a Steinway Artist and makes his home in San Francisco.

Banner photo by Susan and Neil Silverman Photography
Photo of Garrick Ohlsson by Dario Acosta