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Garrick Ohlsson, piano
Since his triumph at the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition,
American pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide
as a musician of extraordinary interpretive power and prodigious
technical facility. Although he has long been regarded as
one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of
Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire that encompasses
virtually the entire piano literature. A student of the late
Claudio Arrau, Mr. Ohlsson is noted for his masterly performances
of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as
the Romantic repertoire. Mr. Ohlsson’s concerto repertoire
alone is unusually wide and eclectic— ranging from Haydn
and Mozart to 20th-century masters—and to date he has
at his command some 80 works for piano and orchestra.
Since his Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra debut in 1972, Mr.
Ohlsson has performed frequently with the CSO, most recently
in the fall of 2003.
Garrick Ohlsson’s current season includes performances
with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and a
North American tour with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.
In recent seasons he commissioned and premiered a work for
solo piano by John Adams titled American Berserk, and
a piano concerto by the noted young composer Michael Hersch.
In the summer of 2005 he will perform all the Beethoven piano
sonatas at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.
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.
Mr. Ohlsson has recorded the complete solo works of Chopin
for Arabesque, as well as four volumes of Beethoven Sonatas.
A native of White Plains, New York, Mr. Ohlsson began his
piano studies at the age of 8. He attended the Westchester
Conservatory of Music and at 13 he entered The Juilliard School.
In high school Mr. Ohlsson demonstrated an extraordinary aptitude
for mathematics and languages, but the concert stage remained
his true career objective. Mr. Ohlsson’s 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 1968 Montreal Piano Competition,
it was his 1970 triumph at the 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 that
time, he has made nearly a dozen tours of Poland, where to
this day 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, Michigan.
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