Garrick Ohlsson

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. 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.

A frequent guest with orchestras in New Zealand and Australia, Mr. Ohlsson returned for a nine-city recital tour across Australia in 2023 and appeared with orchestras in Atlanta, Sarasota, Rhode Island, Singapore, Nashville, Prague, Warsaw, Lyon, and Oxford (UK). He performed as a recitalist on programs including works from Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, and Scriabin in New York, Seattle, Baltimore, Prague, Katowice, Krakow, and Wrocław.

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 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 over 100 recordings, on the Arabesque, Bridge Records, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Hyperion, and Virgin Classics labels. His ten-disc set of the complete Beethoven Sonatas has garnered critical acclaim, including a Grammy for Vol. 3. His most recently released recordings are the complete Beethoven concerti with Sir Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra, Justin Dello Joio’s Oceans Apart with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the complete works of Chopin, and piano sonatas of Schubert.

A native of White Plains, New York, Garrick Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of 8 at the Westchester Conservatory of Music; at 13 he entered The Juilliard School. 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 popularity.

Among many other awards, Mr. Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994, and in 2018 the Polish Deputy Culture Minister awarded him the Gloria Artis Gold Medal for cultural merit. He is a Steinway Artist and makes his home in San Francisco.