‘Some pianists make me shake with anger’: Vikingur Olafsson interviewed

At the BBC Proms this year, an Icelandic pianist dressed like a Wall Street broker played a slow movement from a Bach organ sonata that had the audience first gasping and then stamping their feet. This was an encore to a performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto that neither milked the poetry nor romped thrillingly through the finale – and that, too, nearly had the Prommers throwing their underwear at the shy soloist.

How do you explain the phenomenon of Vikingur Olafsson? At first glance, he fits the mould of the bespectacled scholar-pianist who recoils from vulgarity – a young Alfred Brendel or Richard Goode, say, whose Beethoven or Schubert cycles have the cognoscenti underlining felicities in the score.

But Olafsson has recorded no complete cycles of the Viennese masters and never will. He was 32 before he appeared on a major label – Deutsche Grammophon, which is notorious for signing teenagers with transcendental techniques and then quietly dropping them. He has produced six complete albums in eight years and they don’t include a concerto. Nor – with one mighty exception – will you find the peaks of the repertoire: no Liszt Sonata or Schumann Fantasy in C, and nothing by Beethoven, Schubert or Chopin.

But you will find seven pieces by his friend the 98-year-old Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, whose fragments are as compact as Webern but glitter like Messiaen. In fact, you’ll hear them twice on his album From Afar, because Olafsson gives us a playlist of Bach, Schumann, Brahms, Bartok, Kurtag and Adès on a Steinway and then exactly the same pieces on an upright piano. And DG indulged him, because Vikingur Olafsson’s tracks have been streamed nearly a billion times.

He is a cult pianist. This isn’t to say that he’s more famous than DG’s two other stars: Yuja Wang, whose gossamer textures defy belief, and Lang Lang, whose tragic crossover antics are big in China.