Boston Classical Review

Víkingur Ólafsson performed a recital Friday night at Symphony Hall. Photo: Robert Torres

“Key of E?” the playwright Franz Liebkind asks Max Bialystock during the first act of Mel Brooks’ musical The Producers.

“Is there any other?” comes the reply.

There wasn’t on Friday when Víkingur Ólafsson made his solo recital debut at Symphony Hall with a program of music in E—both minor and major—by Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven.

Quirky though it may seem, the Icelandic pianist’s concept was rooted in the old notion that tonal areas hold specific expressive associations. Though less common today, the concept was familiar to the night’s composers: an 1806 treatise by Christian Schubart lists the qualities of E major as including “laughing pleasures and…full delights” while the minore version encapsulates the more questionable “naïve, womanly innocent declaration of love” and “lament without grumbling.”

If anything, though, Ólafsson’s appearance, which was presented by Vivo Performing Arts, underlined the shortsightedness of such reductive categorizations and thinking.

Surely there is nothing pedantic about the pianist’s artistry, which combines astounding technique with a musical intellect of the highest order. Both characteristics were on potent display in Friday’s account of Bach’s E-minor Partita (No. 6), which, for all its dizzying density, unfolded with commanding logic and exhilarating musicality.

Ólafsson’s playing consistently drew out the richness and variety of the writing, especially in the opening Toccata. Here, the noble framing sections offset a fugue of towering purpose and thrilling contrapuntal vigor. Meantime, the Sarabande’s dissonances floated with jazzy smokiness.

In the shorter movements that fill out the suite, the keyboardist teased out a range of characters—a coy Allemande, snapping Gavotte—as well as kaleidoscopic colors. Throughout, he balanced energy with order, the rapid-fire passagework in the Corrente and Air straining at the bit but never derailing. In the concluding Gigue, Ólafsson offered the night’s most tantalizing vision: that of a world of chaos perfectly controlled by ten fingers.

His account of the evening’s Beethoven items was similarly persuasive.

Though the opening movement of the E-minor Sonata (No. 27) felt somewhat literal, Ólafsson’s attention to the music’s rhetorical spirit resulted in a fantasia-like reading that found its outlet in the finale. There, the focus on tonal beauty and melodic fluency proved cathartic, the clarity of the part-writing—especially in the coda—sparkling.

More of the same obtained in Ólafsson’s traversal of the E-major Sonata (No. 30). In it, the fascination of his interpretation lay less in the pianist’s lucid textures, excellent voicings, and bold contrasts of dynamics and character—impressive though those were—than in his command of rhythm.

As a result, the novelty of Beethoven’s writing, particularly in the finale, emerged with refreshing force. Rarely do the connections between the prayerful theme and its subsequent variations come out with the feisty, three-dimensional vigor they betrayed on Friday.

Given the company, Schubert’s Sonata in E minor looked, on paper, like a lesser work. Even so, the 20-year-old composer’s confidence and originality shined through the score’s sweet lyricism and its natural tendency to dance. What’s more, Ólafsson imbued the concluding Allegretto with a measure of beauty, direction, and tonal richness worthy of the night’s more mature statements.

Across the recital’s intermission-less, 90-minute duration, the pianist demonstrated a remarkable ability to draw in and hold his audience rapt.

Afterward, though, Ólafsson let loose with four encores, not in E (“I can play in more than one key,” he quipped before the first one). If the tetralogy—the pianist’s arrangement of Bach’s Air, Rameau’s Le rappel des Oiseaux and The Arts and the Hours, and Philip Glass’s Etude No. 6—felt a touch scattershot, they gave strong reminders of the artist’s versatility and, through that, the musicianship that makes him one of the most compelling pianists before the public today.

Vivo Performing Arts presents the Takács Quartet and violist Jordan Bak playing music by Schubert and Mozart 8 p.m. on April 11 at Jordan Hall. vivoperformingarts.org

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