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Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson began making his mark on the wider classical music world in the mid-2010s after winning several major arts prizes in his homeland. Since then, he has become much more widely known and admired for his imaginative programs and his musicianship, mixing music ranging from the Baroque to contemporary composers. He performs with orchestras all over the world and has won several prizes for his recordings.

Ólafsson began his studies at home in Iceland, then earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Juilliard, where his primary teachers were Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald. By 2017, he had premiered five piano concertos, working directly with composers such as Philip Glass, Daníel Bjarnason, and Haukur Tómasson, whose concerto he premiered during the 2016-2017 season. He has also collaborated on projects with visual artists such as Roman Signer and Lillevän, and musicians like Sayaka Shoji, Pekka Kuusisto, and Björk. Ólafsson's recital programs are thoughtfully assembled, linking music by theme, historical context, tonality, or a combination of elements. That kind of care and insight led him to host a TV series about classical music for the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service entitled Útúrdúr ("Out-of-tune," 2013-2014), and to him being named artistic director of Iceland's Vinterfest, taking over in 2016 from the music festival's founding director, Martin Fröst. Ólafsson is also founder and artistic director of the Reykjavík Midsummer Music festival.

Having by then released three albums on his own, including Schubert's Winterreise with bass Kristinn Sigmundsson, he signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon in November 2016. His first release on the label, Philip Glass: Piano Works, appeared in January 2017. Later that same year, Ólafsson was the featured pianist on Dario Marianelli's score for the Academy Award-nominated film Darkest Hour, about Winston Churchill. In 2018, he released the critically acclaimed album Johann Sebastian Bach, which yielded the artist a slew of awards including Gramophone's Artist of the Year. He issued the companion piece J.S. Bach: Works & Reworks in 2019, which included remixes of his Bach performances by artists such as Peter Gregson, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. That same year, he gave the French premiere of the John Adams piano concerto, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes. During the initial COVID-19 lockdown, Ólafsson broadcast live programs on the BBC from the empty Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík, winning even more fans worldwide. His 2022-2023 season included performances throughout North America and Europe, and the release of From Afar, a selection of pieces he played as a youngster plus more, each recorded once both on a concert grand and again on an upright piano. ~ Patsy Morita

In his day, Johann Sebastian Bach was better known as a virtuoso organist than as a composer. His sacred music, organ and choral works, and other instrumental music had an enthusiasm and seeming freedom that concealed immense rigor. Bach's use of counterpoint was brilliant and innovative, and the immense complexities of his compositional style -- which often included religious and numerological symbols that seem to fit perfectly together in a profound puzzle of special codes -- still amaze musicians today. Many consider him the greatest composer of all time.

Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685. He was taught to play the violin and harpsichord by his father, Johann Ambrosius, a court trumpeter in the service of the Duke of Eisenach. Young Johann was not yet ten when his father died, leaving him orphaned. He was taken in by his recently married oldest brother, Johann Christoph, who lived in Ohrdruf. Because of his excellent singing voice, Bach attained a position at the Michaelis monastery at Lüneberg in 1700. His voice changed a short while later, but he stayed on as an instrumentalist. After taking a short-lived post in Weimar in 1703 as a violinist, Bach became organist at the Neue Kirche in Arnstadt (1703-1707). His relationship with the church council was tenuous as the young musician often shirked his responsibilities, preferring to practice the organ. One account describes a four-month leave granted Bach to travel to Lubeck, where he would familiarize himself with the music of Dietrich Buxtehude. He returned to Arnstadt long after he was expected and much to the dismay of the council. He then briefly served at St. Blasius in Mühlhausen as organist, beginning in June 1707, and married his cousin, Maria Barbara Bach, that fall. Bach composed his famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) and his first cantatas while in Mühlhausen, but quickly outgrew the musical resources of the town. He next took a post for the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar in 1708, serving as court organist and playing in the orchestra, eventually becoming its leader in 1714. He wrote many organ compositions during this period, including his Orgel-Büchlein, and also began writing the preludes and fugues that would become Das wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well-Tempered Klavier). Owing to politics between the Duke and his officials, Bach left Weimar and secured a post in December 1717 as Kapellmeister at Köthen. In 1720, Bach's wife suddenly died, leaving him with four children (three others had died in infancy). A short while later, he met his second wife, soprano Anna Magdalena Wilcke, whom he married in December 1721. She would bear 13 children, though only five would survive childhood. The six Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51), among many other secular works, date from his Köthen years. Bach became Kantor of the Thomas School in Leipzig in May 1723 (after the post was turned down by Georg Philipp Telemann) and held the position until his death. It was in Leipzig that he composed the bulk of his religious and secular cantatas. Bach eventually became dissatisfied with this post, not only because of its meager financial rewards, but also because of onerous duties and inadequate facilities. Thus he took on other projects, chief among which was the directorship of the city's Collegium Musicum, an ensemble of professional and amateur musicians who gave weekly concerts, in 1729. He also became music director at the Dresden Court in 1736, in the service of Frederick Augustus II; though his duties were vague and apparently few, they allowed him the freedom to compose what he wanted. Bach began making trips to Berlin in the 1740s, not least because his son Carl Philipp Emanuel served as a court musician there. The Goldberg Variations, one of the few pieces by Bach to be published in his lifetime, appeared in 1741. In May 1747, the composer was warmly received by King Frederick II of Prussia, for whom he wrote the gloriously abstruse Musical Offering (BWV 1079). Among Bach's last works was his 1749 Mass in B minor. Besieged by diabetes, he died on July 28, 1750. ~ Robert Cummings

György Kurtág is one of the more highly esteemed composers of the late twentieth century. He is not well known outside of Europe, writing little and not prone to acts of self-promotion. Most composers would not have been able to establish a career in this manner.

His hometown changed hands from Hungary to Romania. What he saw while under Communist rule before he went west no doubt shaped the peculiar tensions of his music, which often sounds like lessons learned through surviving persecution. In 1940, he studied piano with Magda Kardos and composition from Max Eisikovits, at Temesvár (Timisoara, Romania). He then moved to Budapest in 1946, enrolling in the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, studying composition with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, as well as piano with Pál Kadosa and chamber music with Leó Weiner. These people remained proud Hungarians, though war had altered the international borders drastically. Kurtág officially became a Hungarian citizen in 1948. In the early part of the 1950s, he continued his studies of composition, chamber music, and piano. He was an outstanding student, winning the Erkl prize in 1954 and 1956. In 1957 - 1958 he went west for a one-year stay in Paris, studying with Marianne Stein and attending courses of Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen.

Though the standard of living in democratic France was no doubt higher than communist Hungary, Kurtág returned home as repetiteur of soloists with the Hungarian National Philharmonia throughout most the 1960s. He was also professor at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest, first of piano, then of chamber music. In 1971, he had his second appointment in the west. This time it was a one-year stay in West Berlin as grantee of the DAAD scholarship. His reputation began to gain more ground.

What little he had written demonstrated itself as the work of genius, beginning with the brief Quartetto per archi opus 1 from 1959. A perfect synthesis of Webern and Bartók, this work has an undistracted intelligence about it, a courage that intellectuals required to survive the tyranny of the Soviets. He did seem entirely at odds with the Communists, having written some works with anti-American sentiment, but this appeared exclusively before his visit to Paris in the 1950s. The 1960s and 1970s were been fairly uneventful, and his catalog continued to grow at a startlingly slow rate. However, what works he had written made a large impression.

After his retirement from the Liszt Academy in 1986, he lived in Germany and Austria. In 1987, one year after leaving Hungary, he immediately became a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Munich, as well as a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. His works were getting more sought after, and he was relentlessly sought after as an instructor.

Living at a comparatively brisker, international pace, in 1993 he was awarded the Prix de Composition Musicale by the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco, for his Grabstein für Stephan and Op. 27 No. 2 (Double Concerto); the Herder Prize by the Freiherr-vom-Stein Stiftung, Hamburg; and the Premio Feltrinelli by the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome. That same year, Kurtág was invited to stay in Berlin as composer in residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker for two years. This was followed by a residency with the Wiener Konzerthaus and, in 1998, the Kossuth Prize from the Hungarian states for his life's work.

Kurtág had carved his place in the Western world while still behind the Iron Curtain, emerging in the 1980s as an indisputably necessary voice.

Through his far-reaching endeavors as composer, performer, educator, and ethnomusicolgist, Béla Bartók emerged as one of the most forceful and influential musical personalities of the 20th century.

Born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Romania), on March 25, 1881, Bartók began his musical training with piano studies at the age of five, foreshadowing his lifelong affinity for the instrument. Following his graduation from the Royal Academy of Music in 1901 and the composition of his first mature works -- most notably, the symphonic poem Kossuth (1903) -- Bartók embarked on one of the classic field studies in the history of ethnomusicology. With fellow countryman and composer Zoltán Kodály, he traveled throughout Hungary and neighboring countries, collecting thousands of authentic folk songs. Bartók's immersion in this music lasted for decades, and the intricacies he discovered therein, from plangent modality to fiercely aggressive rhythms, exerted a potent influence on his own musical language.

In addition to his compositional activities and folk music research, Bartók's career unfolded amid a bustling schedule of teaching and performing. The great success he enjoyed as a concert artist in the 1920s was offset somewhat by difficulties that arose from the tenuous political atmosphere in Hungary, a situation exacerbated by the composer's frank manner. As the specter of fascism in Europe in the 1930s grew ever more sinister, he refused to play in Germany and banned radio broadcasts of his music there and in Italy. A concert in Budapest on October 8, 1940, was the composer's farewell to the country which had provided him so much inspiration and yet caused him so much grief. Days later, Bartók and his wife set sail for America.

In his final years Bartók was beleaguered by poor health. Though his prospects seemed sunnier in the final year of his life, his last great hope -- to return to Hungary -- was dashed in the aftermath of World War II. He died of leukemia in New York on September 26, 1945. The composer's legacy included a number of ambitious but unrealized projects, including a Seventh String Quartet; two major works, the Viola Concerto and the Piano Concerto No. 3, were completed from Bartók's in-progress scores and sketches by his pupil, Tibor Serly.

From its roots in the music he performed as a pianist -- Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms -- Bartók's own style evolved through several stages into one of the most distinctive and influential musical idioms of the first half of the 20th century. The complete assimilation of elements from varied sources -- the Classical masters, contemporaries like Debussy, folk songs -- is one of the signal traits of Bartók's music. The polychromatic orchestral textures of Richard Strauss had an immediate and long-lasting effect upon Bartók's own instrumental sense, evidenced in masterpieces such as Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1945). Bartók demonstrated an especial concern with form in his exploitation and refinement of devices like palindromes, arches, and proportions based on the "golden section." Perhaps above all other elements, though, it is the ingenious application of rhythm that gives Bartók's music its keen edge. Inspired by the folk music he loved, Bartók infused his works with asymmetrical, sometimes driving, often savage, rhythms, which supply violent propulsion to works such as Allegro barbaro (1911) and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937). If a single example from Bartók's catalogue can be regarded as representative, it is certainly the piano collection Mikrokosmos (1926-1939), originally intended as a progressive keyboard primer for the composer's son, Peter. These six volumes, comprising 153 pieces, remain valuable not only as a pedagogical tool but as an exhaustive glossary of the techniques -- melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, formal -- that provided a vessel for Bartók's extraordinary musical personality. ~ Michael Rodman

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was not only one of the greatest composers of the Classical period, but one of the greatest of all time. Surprisingly, he is not identified with radical formal or harmonic innovations, or with the profound kind of symbolism heard in some of Bach's works. Mozart's best music has a natural flow and irresistible charm, and can express humor, joy or sorrow with both conviction and mastery. His operas, especially his later efforts, are brilliant examples of high art, as are many of his piano concertos and later symphonies. Even his lesser compositions and juvenile works feature much attractive and often masterful music.

Mozart was the last of seven children, of whom five did not survive early childhood. By the age of three he was playing the clavichord, and at four he began writing short compositions. Young Wolfgang gave his first public performance at the age of five at Salzburg University, and in January 1762, he performed on harpsichord for the Elector of Bavaria. There are many astonishing accounts of the young Mozart's precocity and genius. At the age of seven, for instance, he picked up a violin at a musical gathering and sight-read the second part of a work with complete accuracy, despite his never having had a violin lesson.

In the years 1763-1766, Mozart, along with his father Leopold, a composer and musician, and sister Nannerl, also a musically talented child, toured London, Paris, and other parts of Europe, giving many successful concerts and performing before royalty. The Mozart family returned to Salzburg in November 1766. The following year young Wolfgang composed his first opera, Apollo et Hyacinthus. Keyboard concertos and other major works also came from his pen.

In 1769, Mozart was appointed Konzertmeister at the Salzburg Court by the Archbishop. Beginning that same year, the Mozarts made three tours of Italy, where the young composer studied Italian opera and produced two successful efforts, Mitridate and Lucio Silla. In 1773, Mozart was back in Austria, where he spent most of the next few years composing. He wrote all his violin concertos between 1774 and 1777, as well as Masses, symphonies, and chamber works.

In 1780, Mozart wrote his opera Idomeneo, which became a sensation in Munich. After a conflict with the Archbishop, Mozart left his Konzertmeister post and settled in Vienna. He received a number of commissions and took on a well-paying but unimportant Court post. In 1782 Mozart married Constanze Weber and took her to Salzburg the following year to introduce her to his family. 1782 was also the year that saw his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail staged with great success.

In 1784, Mozart joined the Freemasons, apparently embracing the teachings of that group. He would later write music for certain Masonic lodges. In the early and mid-1780s, Mozart composed many sonatas and quartets, and often appeared as soloist in the 15 piano concertos he wrote during this period. Many of his commissions were for operas now, and Mozart met them with a string of masterpieces. Le nozze di Figaro came 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787, Così fan tutte in 1790, and Die Zauberflöte in 1791. Mozart made a number of trips in his last years, and while his health had been fragile in previous times, he displayed no serious condition or illness until he developed a fever of unknown origin near the end of 1791. ~ Robert Cummings