Olafsson (and Bach) to the rescue!

When superstar pianist Yuja Wang had to withdraw from her program with fellow pianist Vikingur Olafsson, the Icelander virtuoso saved the day with a grand performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Vikingur Olafsson performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations in San Francisco, march 2, 2025. Photo by Kristen Loken, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony.

If you see a bunch of classical music lovers wandering around town today with neck braces, there’s a reason. Last night the audience at the San Francisco Symphony suffered about as a severe case of aesthetic whiplash as it’s possible to have—a massive disappointment followed by an artistic triumph.

The crowd that packed into Davies Symphony Hall last night were expecting to hear a pair of world-famous piano virtuosos, Yuja Wang and Vikingur Olafsson, playing a wonderfully adventurous and eclectic program of music for two pianos, including pieces by avant-gardists John Cage and Luciano Berio, contemporary masters John Adams and Arvo Part, and classic works by Franz Schubert and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Part of the buzz was created by the pairing of the flamboyant Wang, described by the Chronicle’s (sadly) retired classical music critic Joshua Kosman as “perhaps today’s leading practitioner of the ‘aren’t I amazing’ school of performance,” and the equally technically dazzling but more outwardly restrained Olafsson. I went with my cousin Jonathan Alford, an accomplished classical and jazz pianist, who had seen Wang perform. He said she was an absolute monster, but that her show-offy, dress-slit-up-to-the-thigh persona could be so distracting that he sometimes had to close his eyes to hear the superb music she was making.

A sign that something had gone very wrong appeared as soon as we entered the hall. Instead of two concert grands on the stage, there was only one. Had I somehow misread the program? Was this going to be music for four hands instead of for two pianos? That question was answered a symphony spokesman walked onto the stage and informed us that unfortunately, Yuja Wang was ill (she had an infected finger) and would be unable to perform. However, he told us, Vikingur Olafsson had agreed to perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations—on three hours’ notice.

I am not an expert in classical music. I had probably only listened to the Goldberg Variations once in my life, and only because Glenn Gould’s 1956 recording was so famous that even ignoramuses like me knew it—the way rock fans back in the day used to have exactly two jazz records in their LP collections, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. But Jonathan told me it was extremely challenging to play—one of the most difficult pieces in the entire classical repertory. And even though Olafsson was a drop-dead virtuoso and had mastered it, devoting an entire 2023-24 world tour to playing it (he performed it 90 times), having to play it on three hours’ notice seemed like it might be a different matter entirely.

But for Olafsson, it wasn’t. He walked onto the stage, said a few words, and for the next hour and a half proceeded to transport the audience into a musical universe unlike any other I’ve ever visited, intricate and deep and mathematical and lyrical and, I was to discover, astonishingly varied within its confined form.

I must confess that the piece’s variety was not something that I immediately grasped. Yes, the piece consists of 30 different variations on an opening and closing aria, but they are all variations on the same theme (and mostly in the same key, too). And in large part because of my lack of expertise, even those variations, for all their differences, sounded somewhat similar. When you lack deep knowledge of an art form, its subtleties tend to go over your head. And in the case of a piece like the Goldberg Variations, which is as fiendishly ingenious as a handmade clock with 3,000 moving parts giving you the hour, the minute and the second on four continents and the moon simultaneously, it’s easy for a tyro to miss both the technical finesses and the full range of the emotional spectrum those whirring gears create.

So I missed a lot, and it’s no use pretending I didn’t. Expertise isn’t everything, but there are times when it is invaluable. I wish I had gone into the concert knowing a lot more than I did, because I would have heard more and learned more and enjoyed it more. I wish I had known what Jonathan told me afterwards, that every third variation in the piece is a canon, and that each succeeding canon starts its second melody an interval higher. I heard some startlingly modern dissonances in the piece, but I didn’t know that these were the result of these regularly recurring, shifting intervals. Beyond that, I just wish I had bigger ears for classical music.

Jonathan made me feel a little better for my failure to achieve a state of incessant ecstasy during the concert (in fact, my eyes got a little heavy a few times) by pointing out than in some ways, the Goldberg Variations is a technical exercise—the world’s most sublime one, but an exercise nonetheless. “It’s like Bach is a mad scientist, going into his lab and showing off what he can do,” he said. “’OK, you want me to take this theme and run 30 different variations on it, with all these different criss-crossing melodic lines and a canon with a different interval in every third variation and your hands crossing all the time? No problem!’ It’s an incredible tour de force, but it can feel a little academic.”

In the end, though, Olafsson’s playing went far beyond the academic. What I took away from his magisterial performance—and why I, despite being an ignoramus, feel empowered to call it magisterial—was the intense feeling with which he suffused it, and the freedom with which he approached the score. It was a profoundly emotional, Romantic reading: He made Bach sound like Chopin. Indeed, Jonathan said he was shocked at the liberties Olafsson took with the score: “So much rubato!” (Rubato is a disregarding of strict tempo to create expression.) “I’m still trying to figure out what I think about his reading,” he said. “I’m used to a more classical interpretation of the Goldbergs, like Andras Schiff’s. But he’s an amazing pianist. He has incredible control in blending together different lines and controlling tempos. He can do things I’ve never heard before.”

Those lucky enough to be at Davies will long remember the night that Vikingur Olafsson stepped in to pinch-hit for Yuja Wang in the bottom of the ninth—and hit a grand slam.