Recording of the Week, Víkingur Ólafsson performs piano music by Mozart and contemporaries

Something that never ceases to amaze me about Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is the variety of touch and sheer range of colours that he brings to his playing, qualities that are abundantly present in his fourth album for Deutsche Grammophon, juxtaposing pieces by Mozart with those of contemporaries including Haydn, Galuppi, Cimarosa, and CPE Bach. For instance, he provides crystal clarity in the runs and turns of the Mozart Rondo in D major, K485 just moments after a dreamy, heavily-pedalled account of his own arrangement of Cimarosa's Sonata No. 42 in D minor. This latter performance is extraordinary: by slowing the tempo right down and, in Ólafsson's words, "adding a bit of sonority and quite a few chords", it is transformed into a cross between the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and a Chopin Nocturne.

Not at all coincidentally, another piece this reimagined movement is strongly reminiscent of is the one that immediately follows it, namely Mozart's Fantasy, K397 (also in D minor). When I reviewed Ólafsson's recording of works by Debussy and Rameau last year, I noted how much thought had gone into not just the selection of pieces but also the ordering of them, and this care is evident here too: the Cimarosa ends with an imperfect cadence on a chord of A major, leading seamlessly into the D minor opening of the Fantasy. In fact, so effective is this tactic that Ólafsson deploys it again later, where Mozart's C minor Sonata, K457 is prefaced by the first movement of a Galuppi sonata that concludes on a similarly "imperfect" chord of G major, thus making the Mozart feel like a natural continuation.

Ólafsson is happily determined to forge his own path even in the most familiar of repertoire, doing things his own way yet never making his choices feel like mere gimmicks. The D minor Fantasy is technically an unfinished work, with the final ten bars thought to have been added later by the German composer, August Eberhard Müller. Unsatisfied with this traditional solution, Ólafsson ditches the entire closing Allegretto and, in another smooth segue, substitutes it with the aforementioned Rondo, K485.

In an interview with my colleague Katherine (due to be published on our site next week), Ólafsson touched on the subject of repeats, making the point that although he doesn't always include them, when he does it is vital to make the repeated bars sound different each time. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Mozart's Sonata in C major, K545 (popularly known as the Sonata Facile, yet as Ólafsson notes in his booklet essay, it is actually far from easy to perform this piece convincingly!). The first time round, everything is kept quite short and staccato, particularly the left-hand accompaniment. However, on the repeat, Ólafsson plays the same music altogether differently: along with an occasional sprinkling of right-hand ornamentation, he executes the whole passage with much more legato. Many a pianist might have been tempted to mix things up by playing loud the first time and then softer the second (or vice versa), but by changing not the dynamics but the articulation, Ólafsson offers something delightfully distinctive, amply displaying the attention to detail that is the hallmark of his interpretations.

It's not only in the ornamentation and articulation where Ólafsson's innovation is on show: his dedication to keeping the music fresh spills over into his use of the pedals, such as in the B minor Haydn Sonata, Hob.XVI:32, where by judicious deployment of the middle, sostenuto pedal the final notes of the second-movement Trio are permitted to linger and gently fade during the return of the Minuet. Introducing an effect such as this significantly changes the mood of the Minuet's opening bars, and could easily have been distracting, but in Ólafsson's hands it is an ingeniously inventive way to connect the differing sections.

Finally, after all the pyrotechnics and nimble filigree of the various sonatas, Ólafsson ends not with a bang (nor indeed with a whimper), but with a serene coda in the form of Franz Liszt's arrangement of Mozart's choral work, Ave verum corpus. Considering the complexity of many of Liszt's transcriptions, this is a surprisingly restrained affair, and is all the more affecting for its simplicity. Yet again, Ólafsson's beautiful tone and voicing of chords ensure a tranquil close to another exceptional album from this phenomenally accomplished performer.