Home  Media Center Artist Bios Garrick Ohlsson, piano
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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 he has long been regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire, which ranges over the entire piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Mr. Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. His concerto repertoire alone is unusually wide and eclectic – ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century – and to date he has at his command more than 80 concertos.
Last season, in recognition of the bicentenary of Chopin’s birth, Mr. Ohlsson presented a series of all-Chopin recital programs in Seattle, Berkeley and La Jolla, culminating at Lincoln Center in fall and winter of 2010. In conjunction with that project a documentary, “The Art of Chopin,” based on Chopin’s life and music and featuring Mr. Ohlsson, co-produced by Polish, French, British and Chinese television stations, was released in autumn 2010. In summer of 2010, he was featured in all-Chopin programs at the Ravinia and Tanglewood festivals, as well as appearances in Taipei, Beijing, Melbourne and Sydney.
Mr. Ohlsson opened the 2010-2011 season in Carnegie Hall with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra followed by return visits to the Orchestras of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. (National Symphony), Milwaukee, Toronto, Miami (New World Symphony), and San Diego. In Europe, he visited orchestras in Sweden, Denmark, Spain and England, concluding his Chopin recital project in Detroit and New York in December.
In acknowledgement of the bicentenary of Liszt’s birth the 2011/12 season will include recitals of his works in cities including Chicago, Hong Kong , London, and New York, where he will also visit Carnegie Hall with the Atlanta Symphony and Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic. Tours in Europe and Asia include concerts in France, England, Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. Mr. Ohlsson will also return as guest soloist with orchestras in Indianapolis, Nashville, Portland, OR, Ottawa, and San Francisco, where he is a beloved regular. In partnership with the Wroclaw Philharmonic (Poland) he plans a tour of twelve concerts from Florida to California, presenting works of Chopin and Beethoven.
During the summer of 2006, Mr. Ohlsson presented the complete cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas in both the Ravinia and Tanglewood festivals, a cycle he performed for the first time in the summer of 2005 at Switzerland’s prestigious Verbier Festival.
Mr. Ohlsson is an avid chamber musician, who has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Takács and Tokyo string quartets, among other ensembles. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based FOG Trio.
A prolific recording artist, Mr. Ohlsson can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, Bridge, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, and Virgin Classics labels. His ten-disc set of the complete Beethoven sonatas for Bridge Records is now complete and has garnered considerable critical praise, including a Grammy for Vol. 3. In addition, in February 2011 he released a disc of works by Franz Liszt. In the fall of 2008 the English label Hyperion re-released his 16-disc set of the complete works of Chopin, and recently released a disc of all the Brahms piano variations and a two-disc set of Carl Maria von Weber’s four piano sonatas.
A native of White Plains, N.Y., Mr. Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of 8. He attended the Westchester Conservatory of Music and at 13 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, 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. Mr. Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, MI. He makes his home in San Francisco.
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