Classical home listening - Víkingur Ólafsson and Ruby Hughes

The Guardian 0

The Icelandic star’s new album of Mozart and co is another winner. And the soprano contemplates new life and love with Mahler, Ives and Grime

• Víkingur Ólafsson, who made a triumphant Proms debut earlier this month, is exciting to hear live but almost more revelatory on disc. The Icelandic pianist’s distinctly personal recordings, of Bach, of Rameau and Debussy, have an intimacy and personality hard to achieve in the crowded world of piano albums. His latest, Mozart & Contemporaries (Deutsche Grammophon), continues to match his own high standards. He asks how to “deal” with Mozart: easy on first glance, but elusive and difficult once you dig deeper.

Ólafsson tells how, as a child, he agonised over Mozart’s so-called “easy” sonata, the C major, K545. In his fury, the eight-year-old pianist scrawled over the whole score. Was it, he wonders, the strangely difficult runs near the start, or was it that, even at this early age, he was “weighed down by the excess baggage that the idea of Mozart brings with it”? Ólafsson plays nine short pieces by Mozart, giving them light and context by placing them alongside Cimarosa, Galuppi, CPE Bach and Haydn. His clear, agile playing, inner parts brought out, ornaments always fresh, never exaggerated, suggests he has found peace with the composer. This is just the start.