Garrick Ohlsson
About this Artist
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 Chopin, he commands an enormous repertoire ranging over the entire piano literature: he 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.
In 2018/19 season, Ohlsson launched an ambitious project, spread over multiple seasons, exploring the complete solo piano works of Brahms in four programs to be heard in New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Los Angeles, London, and a number of cities across North America. A frequent guest with the orchestras in Australia, he has recently visited Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Hobart as well as the New Zealand Symphony in Wellington and Auckland. In February 2020, he accomplished a seven-city recital tour across Australia just prior to the closure of the concert world due to COVID-19. Since that time and as a faculty member of San Francisco Conservatory of Music, he has been able to contribute to keeping music alive for a number of organizations with live or recorded recital streams, including a duo program with Kirill Gerstein, with whom he will tour the U.S. in winter 2022. With the re-opening of concert activity in the U.S. in summer 2021, he appeared with the Indianapolis and Cleveland orchestras, in recital in San Francisco, Brevard Festival, and in four Brahms recitals at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival. The 2021/22 season began with the KBS orchestra, Seoul, followed by Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle symphony orchestras, with the BBC Glasgow, and with European orchestras in Prague, Hamburg, Lyon, and St. Petersburg. In recital, he can be heard in Los Angeles, Houston, Kansas City, as well as Poland, Germany, and England.
An avid chamber musician, Ohlsson has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Tokyo, and Takacs string quartets, including most recently the Boston Chamber Players on tour in Europe. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based FOG Trio. Passionate about singing and singers, Ohlsson has appeared in recital with such legendary artists as Magda Olivero, Jessye Norman, and Ewa Podleś. He can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Hyperion and Virgin Classics labels.
A native of White Plains, NY, Garrick Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of eight, at the Westchester Conservatory of Music; at 13, he entered the Juilliard School in New York City. He has been awarded first prizes in the Busoni and Montreal piano competitions, the Gold Medal at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw (1970), the Avery Fisher Prize (1994), the University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, MI (1998), the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance by the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music (2014), and the Gloria Artis Gold Medal for cultural merit by the Polish Deputy Culture Minister.