Word: ohlsson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With production up over 600 pianos a year, Bösendorfer now plans to shed its aristocratic reserve and compete with Steinway for the U.S. concert business. It will make Bösendorfers available across the country for performances by travel ing artists. Pianist Garrick Ohlsson has al ready gone over. But the odds are still with the Steinway: 95% of American concert pianists endorse it. Too bad Liszt is not around to judge the competition...
...Complete Polonaises (Garrick Ohlsson, Angel; $11.98). Ohlsson, 25, is a big man (6 ft. 4 in., 240 Ibs.), with the requisite mass and muscle for epic works such as the Polonaise in A-Flat Major; yet he is a sensitive colorist. But maybe he ought to wait until he has a stomachache before he next records the gloomy C minor; his performance is positively joyful with the exuberance of his youthful talent...
Today international music contests are about as numerous-and as hard to tell apart-as Vivaldi concertos. The Chopin event, though, is exceptional because it is held only once every five years, so competitive standards are kept high. After his victory, Ohlsson embarked on a frantic twelve-day concert series in Poland, followed by a four-concert tour with the Philadelphia Orchestra. What he played, of course, was his victory piece: Chopin's Concerto in E Minor. At Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, there were brief bubbles of superfluous agitation. But most of the time Ohlsson played Chopin with...
...Cookies. Never gazing hammily at the ceiling as so many romantic keyboard idols do, Ohlsson made it clear that he prefers Chopin the dramatist, without entirely sacrificing Chopin the nocturnal perfumer. Rightly so. In the E Minor Concerto, Chopin accomplished the considerable feat of turning the roulades, trills and other frills of the 19th century salon style into the stuff of major symphonic theater...
...pounder, Ohlsson is fond of pointing out that the small-boned Chopin loved nothing better than hearing a stronger pianist tear into his music. "You know," says Ohlsson, "in the U.S. we treat the mazurkas, for example, as inconsequentially as tea cookies. But the Poles don't want that kind of refinement. Mazurkas are folk music to them. What they want in them is a nice pow!" Ohlsson has the pow, and starting right now, he also has the how of a new and brightly blooming musical career...