Víkingur Ólafsson: Debussy, Glass & Rameau

Víkingur Ólafsson is a musical storyteller with a gift for making distant composers sound like contemporaries. Here, three radically individual voices meet through their fascination with colour, pattern and the possibilities of the keyboard.

Rameau’s dances and character pieces teem with vivid imagery, from tumbling whirlwinds and singing birds to the pounding repetitions of ‘Les cyclopes’. Almost two centuries later, Debussy creates his own pictures in sound: pattering raindrops, falling snow and the mysterious water spirit Ondine.

Glass brings the conversation right into our own time. The luminous simplicity of ‘Opening’ and the shifting patterns of his Etudes find unexpected echoes in the earlier music that surrounds them.

Rather than separating these composers by centuries, Ólafsson weaves their works together, inviting one piece to answer another. The journey culminates in Rameau’s A minor Suite: music rooted in the Baroque – yet, in Ólafsson’s hands, looking boldly towards the future.

Tickets: from £24