If you haven’t fallen asleep at beach 3, Víkingur Ólafsson offers you Kurtág to the 4e to wake you up. There are 22 tracks, and if you want to sleep, you can get some more… We have been a good audience for the Icelandic pianist so far, but there is a time when certain artists tend to caricature themselves. For conductor Sergiu Celibidache, it happened at the end of the 1980s. Then in his seventies, he got stuck in tempos that were supposed to reach the musical Grail. Víkingur Ólafsson is 38 years old: we still have some “sound Lexomil” to swallow! Víkingur Ólafsson’s niche is the infinitesimal, the piano stroked with a quill pen. Until now, it was part of the poetry of his playing. From Afar, this becomes the substrate. This CD is a drug, somewhere between a tranquilizer and a sleeping pill. As such, it is very effective… except for the people it annoys! The thing turns to horror or to gag when, on a second CD, the same program is proposed on an upright piano, desiccated and artificially reverberated.
To see in video