Garrick Ohlsson, piano & Richard O’Neill, viola

The revered pianist Garrick Ohlsson returns to the Schubert Club in a collaborative recital with GRAMMY award-winning violist Richard O’Neill, to perform a recital of works by Schubert and Rachmaninoff.

Garrick Ohlsson is well-known to Twin Cities audiences from his numerous concerto and recital performances here over the years, including three appearances on the International Artist Series. Since his triumph in 1970 as winner of the Chopin International Piano Competition, Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of superlative interpretive and technical prowess. An avid chamber musician, Mr. Ohlsson has collaborated with the leading ensembles of our day—the Cleveland, Emerson, Tokyo and Takacs string quartets—and has recorded nearly all the standard repertoire for the piano over his long career.

He collaborates in this recital with violist Richard O’Neill, who has distinguished himself as one of the great instrumentalists of his generation. Praised by the New York Times for his “elegant, velvety tone”, and by the London Times as simply “ravishing”, O’Neill is a member of the distinguished Takács Quartet and an Artist Member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He regularly collaborates with the world’s greatest musicians, including Emanuel Ax, Jeremy Denk, Daniil Trifonov, James Ehnes, Steven Isserlis, Edgar Meyer and The Emerson Quartet, among others.

For their International Artist Series recital, O’Neill and Ohlsson have chosen a program that focuses on just two composers, Schubert and Rachmaninoff, that will feature some gems of the repertoire, such as Schubert’s poetic Arpeggione Sonata, and Rachmaninoff’s lush Cello Sonata in a transcription for viola.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. Although long regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire, which ranges over 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. To date he has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century, the most recent being “Oceans Apart” by Justin Dello Joio commissioned for him by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and now available on Bridge Recordings.

For the first time in its history, the Chopin Competition has invited an American to chair the jury, and Mr. Ohlsson assumes that role for the 19th incarnation in October 2025. He will then return as guest soloist to the Cleveland Orchestra and National Symphony (DC), followed in the winter by a duo tour with violist Richard O’Neill which takes them from Los Angeles to Charlottesville (VA), St. Paul (MN), and New York’s 92Y. In solo recital he can be heard in Vienna, London, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

An avid chamber musician, Mr. Ohlsson has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Tokyo and Takacs string quartets. His recording with latter of the Amy Beach and Elgar quintets released by Hyperion in June 2020 received great press attention. Passionate about singing and singers, Mr. Ohlsson has appeared in recital with such legendary artists as Magda Olivero, Jessye Norman, and Ewa Podleś.

Mr. Ohlsson can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Hyperion and Virgin Classics labels. His ten-disc set of the complete Beethoven Sonatas, for Bridge Records, has garnered critical acclaim, including a GRAMMY® for Vol. 3. His recording of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3, with the Atlanta Symphony and Robert Spano, was released in 2011. In the fall of 2008, the English label Hyperion re-released his 16-disc set of the Complete Works of Chopin followed in 2010 by all the Brahms piano variations, Goyescas by Enrique Granados, and music of Charles Tomlinson Griffes. Most recently on that label are Scriabin’s Complete Poèmes, Smetana Czech Dances, and ètudes by Debussy, Bartok and Prokofiev. The latest CDs in his ongoing association with Bridge Records are the Complete Scriabin Sonatas, “Close Connections,” a recital of 20th-Century pieces, and two CDs of works by Liszt. In recognition of the Chopin bicentenary in 2010, Mr. Ohlsson was featured in a documentary “The Art of Chopin” co-produced by Polish, French, British and Chinese television stations. Both Brahms concerti and Tchaikovsky’s second piano concerto were released on live performance recordings with the Melbourne and Sydney Symphonies on their own recording labels, and Mr. Ohlsson was featured on Dvorak’s piano concerto in the Czech Philharmonic’s recordings of the composer’s complete symphonies & concertos, released July of 2014 on the Decca label. Also recently released on Reference Recordings is the complete Beethoven concerti with Sir Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra.

A native of White Plains, N.Y., Garrick Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of 8, at the Westchester Conservatory of Music; at 13 he entered The Juilliard School, in New York City. His 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 the 1968 Montréal Piano Competition, it was his 1970 triumph at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where he won the Gold Medal (and remains the single American to have done so), that brought him worldwide recognition as one of the finest pianists of his generation. Since then he has made nearly a dozen tours of Poland, where 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, MI. He is the 2014 recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music, and in August 2018 the Polish Deputy Culture Minister awarded him with the Gloria Artis Gold Medal for cultural merit. He is a Steinway Artist and makes his home in San Francisco.

Violist of the Takács Quartet Richard O’Neill has distinguished himself as one of the great instrumentalists of his generation.

GRAMMY Award winner for Best Classical Instrumental Solo Performance in 2021, O’Neill is only the second person to receive an award for a viola performance in the history of this category. Following two previous GRAMMY nominations, O’Neill’s recent win for his recording of Christopher Theofanidis’ “Concerto for Viola and Chamber Orchestra” also spotlights conductor David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony. Theofanidis’ composition was inspired by Navajo poetry and the composer’s psychological response to the September 11 attacks.

Also an EMMY Award winner and Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, O’Neill has appeared as soloist with the world’s top orchestras including the London, Los Angeles, Seoul Philharmonics, the BBC, Hiroshima, Korean Symphonies, the Kremerata Baltica, Moscow, Vienna and Wurtemburg Chamber Orchestras, Alte Musik Koln, and has worked with distinguished musicians and conductors including Andrew Davis, Vladimir Jurowski, Francois Xavier Roth and Yannick Nezet-Seguin. An Artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Principal Violist of Camerata Pacifica, for thirteen seasons he served as Artistic Director of DITTO, his South Korean chamber music project, leading the ensemble on international tours to China and Japan and introducing tens of thousands to music.

A Universal Music/Deutsche Grammophon recording artist, he has made 10 solo albums and many other chamber music recordings, earning multiple platinum discs. Composers Lera Auerbach, Elliott Carter, Paul Chihara, John Harbison and Huang Ruo have written works for him. He has appeared on major TV networks in South Korea and enjoyed huge success with his 2004 KBS documentary ‘Human Theater’ which was viewed by over 12 million people, and his 2013 series ‘Hello?! Orchestra’ which featured his work with a multicultural youth orchestra for MBC and led to an International Emmy in Arts Programming and a feature length film.

He serves as Goodwill Ambassador for the Korean Red Cross, The Special Olympics, UNICEF and OXFAM and serves on the faculty of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara.