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“Víkingur Ólafsson is revitalising classical music.” – The Economist Ater the global success of Víkingur Ólafsson’s recordings of Philip Glass · Piano Works, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Debussy · Rameau (with 225 million career streams and 320K albums sold), the multi-award-winning pianist now turns his attention to the music of Mozart. For his latest album, Ólafsson presents some of his favourite Mozart keyboard works in the company of pieces by a selection of the composer’s leading contemporaries. Juxtaposing works by Mozart, Haydn and C.P.E. Bach with rarely-recorded Galuppi and Cimarosa, Mozart & Contemporaries dispels the image of Mozart as the angelic and prodigious idiot savant, instead presenting a mature composer through music primarily dating from the 1780s: a resourceful, hard-working adult who had come to know adversity. All is artfully brought together by Ólafsson’s signature thought-provoking programming. “I find this decade of Mozart’s life and art endlessly fascinating. Mozart was not just a composer, and I feel that when he was writing for himself as a virtuoso pianist he indulged more than ever in the sublime playfulness that lay at the core of his originality and inventiveness. This is the period when Mozart was not just perfecting the Classical tradition but subtly subverting it… the shadows are darker, the nuances and ambiguities more profound.” - Víkingur Ólafsson