Vikingur Olafsson Recorded Continuum II in His Own Studio
Vikingur Olafsson performing at a piano recital.
Vikingur Olafsson performing at a piano recital.
Vikingur Olafsson releases a Bach album in November that he recorded at home in Iceland rather than in a concert hall.
It is the first record he has made entirely in his own studio.
A Studio Instead of a Hall
Classical piano records are almost always made in concert halls or purpose-built recording rooms, and the reason is acoustic.
A grand piano needs volume of air around it. In a small room the instrument overwhelms the space, the low register turns muddy, and the reverberation that makes a piano sound like a piano simply is not there.
Building a studio capable of holding a concert instrument is therefore a serious construction project rather than a matter of buying equipment.
An artist who does it is buying time rather than sound: unlimited access to a room, at any hour, for as long as a record takes.
Why Studio Time Is the Real Constraint
Hall bookings are expensive and they run to a schedule that has nothing to do with the recording.
A pianist recording in a concert hall works around the resident orchestra’s rehearsals, gets the room overnight or on dark days, and pays for a producer and engineer by the day throughout.
That structure pushes everybody toward efficiency, which is the opposite of what a difficult piece needs. Owning the room removes the clock entirely.
The Second Part of a Project
Continuum II follows an earlier instalment, which makes this a project rather than a sequence of unrelated albums.
Multi-part recording projects are common in classical music and rare in the way this one is framed, since most are complete-works cycles organised by catalogue number.
A project with a title rather than a catalogue range implies an argument, and the listener is entitled to expect the second part to advance it.
Bach as the Subject
The material is by Bach, which is both the safest and the most exposed choice available to a pianist.
It is safe because the audience exists and will always exist, and exposed because every note has been recorded hundreds of times by players whose versions are considered definitive.
What that produces is a genre where interpretation is the entire content, since nobody is discovering the notes.
An Arrangement Rather Than a Transcription
The first single was his own arrangement of a well-known Bach piece, released in July.
Arranging Bach for piano has a long history, because most of the music was not written for the instrument in its modern form and someone has always had to decide how it should sound.
A performer who arranges rather than plays an existing transcription is taking on a compositional role, and the choices are audible to anyone who knows the original.
The Piece Behind the Single
The particular work is itself already an arrangement, made in the nineteenth century by a violinist who transposed an orchestral movement so it could be played on a single string.
That version is now more famous than the original, which is an unusual outcome and a useful reminder that the canon is full of accidents.
Arranging it again for solo piano is therefore not a departure from tradition but a continuation of exactly what happened to the piece in the first place.
A Summer of European Halls
The touring this year took in Copenhagen, Oslo, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Lucerne and Grafenegg across August.
Those are among the most acoustically regarded rooms in Europe, and several of them are festival venues that programme only in summer.
A recitalist playing that circuit is doing the classical equivalent of a festival run, with the same compressed routing and the same audiences who booked months ahead.
An Outdoor Date in Austria
The Grafenegg booking is an open-air stage in a castle park, which is a genuinely difficult environment for solo piano.
Amplification becomes unavoidable outdoors, and amplifying a piano well is one of the hardest problems in live sound because the instrument produces an enormous dynamic range from a large resonating body.
Recitalists accept those dates because the audiences are large and unusually mixed, which is exactly the audience a solo piano recital does not otherwise reach.
Autumn in Britain
Later dates include Bristol in September, the Royal Festival Hall in London in October and Liverpool in November.
Spreading three British dates across three months rather than clustering them is unusual, and it generally reflects a season programme booked hall by hall rather than a tour routed by a promoter.
That is how classical touring has always worked, and it explains why a recitalist’s calendar looks scattered compared with a band’s.
The Recital Programme
This season’s programme pairs a late Beethoven sonata with works by Bach and Schubert.
Late Beethoven is the repertoire pianists use to state what they are, since the writing is structurally strange and offers nowhere to hide behind technique.
Placing it alongside Bach is a standard and effective construction, because the counterpoint in the Beethoven is audibly descended from the Bach and the audience hears the connection without being told.
Iceland as a Base
Building the studio in Iceland rather than in a European capital is a decision about where to live as much as where to record.
International classical careers are usually run from a small number of cities, because that is where the halls, the agents and the flights are.
Remaining outside that system requires a career established enough that promoters will book you regardless of where you sleep.
Vinyl for a Solo Piano Record
The album is issued on vinyl as well as digitally and on CD, which is worth noting for this repertoire.
Solo piano is among the hardest material to cut to vinyl, because sustained low frequencies and wide dynamic range are exactly what the format handles least well.
Doing it anyway reflects a physical-media audience that classical labels spent two decades assuming had disappeared.
What Owning a Room Changes About Playing
The effect of unlimited studio access shows up in the performances rather than in the sound.
A pianist on a hall booking plays under time pressure, and the standard response is to record complete takes and pick the best, because assembling a performance from fragments costs more time than anybody has.
With no clock, the same player can record a movement twenty times across three weeks, sleep on it, and return to a passage that never quite worked.
That does not automatically produce better records. It produces different ones, in which the interpretation has been revised rather than captured, and the risk is a performance polished past the point of being alive.
Why Pianists Keep Recording Bach
The obvious objection to another Bach album is that the recorded catalogue is already enormous.
The answer is that Bach wrote almost nothing for the modern piano, so every recording is a translation, and translations date in a way original-language texts do not.
Each generation’s Bach playing reflects what that generation believes about tempo, ornamentation, pedalling and whether the instrument should pretend to be a harpsichord.
A pianist recording it now is not competing with the definitive versions so much as declaring what the music sounds like from here, which is a question that has to be reasked every twenty years or so.
What Is Actually Being Tested
Two things. Whether a purpose-built home studio can produce a piano sound that stands next to records made in the great halls.
And whether a second instalment advances the project or simply extends it, which is the question every multi-part recording eventually has to answer.
One studio in Iceland, one composer, a summer of European halls, and a record arriving in November.
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