ARTIST PROFILE

Garrick Ohlsson

BIOGRAPHY

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, American pianist GARRICK OHLSSON has established himself 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, which encompasses virtually the entire piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Mr. Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire.

Mr. Ohlsson's concerto repertoire is unusually wide and eclectic -- ranging from Haydn and Mozart to 20th century masters --and he has at his command some 80 works for piano and orchestra. In recent seasons he has been heard with the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Boston, Toronto, San Francisco, Seattle, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis. Internationally, he had solo engagements with Tokyo's NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsche Orchester Berlin at the Beijing Festival in China, and with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic. He has performed solo recitals throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe-a highlight being complete Chopin cycles in New York, Paris, London, and Warsaw. Mr. Ohlsson frequently performs at summer festivals such as the Tanglewood, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Riverbend, Blossom and Bellingham music festivals.

During 2002-03 Mr. Ohlsson was featured by Lincoln Center's Great Performers in "Busoni at the Keyboard," a three-recital series at Alice Tully Hall, which presented the piano music of Busoni, in the company of works by Bach, and Liszt. The series highlighted the influence of Bach and Liszt in shaping Busoni's highly original synthesis of the classic, the Romantic, and the avant-garde.

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. Mr. Ohlsson was born in White Plains, New York, where he began his piano studies at the age of eight. He attended the Westchester Conservatory of Music and at 13 he entered The Juilliard School in New York City. 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.