Dreaming about Heavenly Music: An Interview with Garrick Ohlsson

GARRICK_OHLSSON-6228-2000x1333-fot-Dario-Acosta.jpg, default, Garrick Ohlsson, photo: Dario Acosta

Garrick Ohlsson, the winner of the 1970 Chopin Competition (and the only American winner in the competition’s history) discusses artists’ obligations to society, the fears of young pianists, and what it’s like performing in politically-turbulent countries.

Filip Lech: What does being a pianist mean to you?

Garrick Ohlsson: A lot. The piano is a medium that connects me to the best music ever written. It allows me to test my abilities – physical, technical and emotional. Most importantly, it connects me to something much bigger than myself. I happen to like my profession, I can even say that it brings me joy and satisfaction. I’m lucky to be able to play music more effortlessly than most people.

I’m not too introverted, so I enjoy working with other musicians. I’m not too extroverted either, so working in the quiet soothes me. Obviously, being a pianist is a very hard job that takes a lot of sacrifice, but I’ve learned to appreciate it over the past five decades. Now I like it more than ever before.

FL: So-called ‘work-life balance’ is a topic that psychologists and other experts talk a lot about nowadays. Do you feel like you’ve found it?

GO: (laughs) Yes and no, as is probably the case for most people. I’ve never wanted music to consume my life entirely. My career has allowed me to travel and experience many unforgettable things that I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

Your country is a particular example – after I won the Chopin Competition, I was able to return to Poland many times, perhaps more often than Martha Argerich, Maurizio Pollini and other great winners. Before 1989, the Polish audience understood that it wasn’t easy for me because of the political situation and rewarded my efforts with an interest in my work – it was very gratifying, I felt needed. I met many wonderful people back then and had a chance to actually witness historical moments with my own eyes.

In the 1970s, I sensed an atmosphere of immense anxiety in Poland. Under martial law, I was on a flight from Warsaw to Wrocław, accompanied by armed soldiers who wouldn’t let me take my seat and directed me to the other end of the plane. I wasn’t a tourist, I was in touch with people who told me what was happening in the country, some more, some less directly. It was an important lesson for me. As a young man from distant America, I didn’t know much about life and the world. As an American, I was interesting to Poles, everybody wanted to talk to me. In East Germany, by contrast, people were afraid to talk to me.

I didn’t just visit Poland but also other countries behind the Iron Curtain. I also travelled to Asia. It was possible thanks to my success in different competitions, most importantly, my win at the Chopin Competition.

But I digress. Sorry, I’m afraid I tend to do so! As for ‘work-life balance’ – I’ve never wanted to be a music monk spending his entire life in a cell. Music is a social art. You meet new people when you perform with orchestras and ensembles. You may not grow as close as dear friends, but the bond is still very much unique. You might not know their partners’ or children’s names, but it doesn’t mean those relationships are shallow. I enjoy their intensity.

I’ve always had some ‘normal’ hobbies aside from music. I’m a regular person. I enjoy going to the theatre and cinema, reading, riding my bike through parks, going on holiday, and spending time with friends. Everyone has to find out what balance means to them.

I feel like the younger generation of aspiring professionals often tends to forget about the amount of work that awaits them. Recently, one orchestra member told me that in job interviews, young people go straight to asking about the amount of free time during weekends. Unfortunately, the music industry often consumes your weekends – if you’re not ready for the sacrifice, perhaps it’s worth considering a different profession. You won’t be able to cancel a concert to go see a theatre play. It’s a demanding profession for everybody.

FL: Do you think that artists have obligations towards society? Should public figures set an example and speak up about important issues? I ask this with the war in Ukraine at the back of my mind…

GO: That’s a very difficult question. When it comes to the war in Ukraine – I’m totally against it and I hate it. But I’m an American citizen and an award-winning musician, so I have nothing to lose when I say it out loud. I was supposed to perform in Saint Petersburg in April last year and I eventually didn’t. It was a no-brainer, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to perform there. In a way, the decision was made for me. I hadn’t really performed much in Russia anyway, so I’m not missing out on much. However, my friends from Ukraine and Russia who are active in their local music scenes are forced to face tougher dilemmas.

Is an artist obliged to speak up? I think each situation is different. Unfortunately, nothing is black and white. My young Russian colleague, the very talented 21-year-old Alexander Malofeev, had his debut recital in Montreal cancelled because he was Russian. Is every Russian artist somehow linked to Putin? I don’t think so. Some are – like Valery Gergiev or Anna Netrebko, whose deep connections are publicly known – but should a 21-year-old boy take a stance? I don’t know, it’s a difficult question. Everyone has to decide for themselves.

Another person who comes to mind is Dalia Stasevska – the Finland-born Ukrainian conductor. She personally went to Ukraine to deliver medical aid – that’s an amazing thing to do.

Let me tell you a personal story.I didn’t support the Vietnam War, you could say I was very much opposed to it, but I was also young and naive, and I didn’t engage in politics (I still don’t, even though I have firm political views and I know we live in strange times). After I’d won the competition in Warsaw, my career started blossoming. I was becoming a young star. I visited the University of Wisconsin, a huge institution, I think over 30,000 people study there. A student newspaper journalist, roughly my age, was asking me rather political questions. By American standards, he was a leftist, but you Europeans would probably call him a centrist.

He asked me if I’d play in Greece, to which I replied: ‘Yes, of course I would.’ He then asked why would I play for a right-wing military dictatorship, how could I support it? Well, after all those years, I’d still have given him the same answer, which went more or less like this: ‘I don’t think playing a concert is tantamount to supporting a dictatorship. I’m freshly back from a competition hosted in a communist country, all while the Soviet regime is committing terrible acts in the USSR and the bordering countries. In Poland, I met people who told me what they’d experienced, things I had no idea about living in the States. Meanwhile, Americans are doing atrocious things in Vietnam. I didn’t perform for the Polish government. Representatives of the communist authorities must’ve been there, but I wasn’t playing for them.’ The journalist didn’t like my answer, but he admitted he’d never thought of those matters in that way before.

Let me tell you another one. Many years later, my London agent started organising my South African tour. My New York agent found out and panicked. He told me to cancel the whole thing and insisted I couldn’t go. At the time, I didn’t really know anything about apartheid, so I asked naively: ‘Why?’ He promised he’d explain it further soon and stressed that morality aside, I simply shouldn’t do it because it could ruin my career. Maybe no one would openly comment on it, but some decisive people from the industry – concert organisers, conductors, orchestras – would simply stop inviting me to collaborate.

I had a Mauritian friend who worked in the United Nations. He told me more about the situation in South Africa than I wanted to know. I immediately called my English agent and cancelled the shows. Next time I visited London, I got a call from a lovely lady from the South African Broadcasting Corporation who very politely asked to speak to me. We had a courteous and civil discussion. She kept persuading me to come, that it would be wonderful if I came and so on. So I asked her what audience I’d be performing for. She seemed very surprised by the question, but eventually answered that it’d be like most concerts around the world: probably 60% of them would be Jews. I told her she’d given me the best possible answer, but I still had to refuse.

I’m reminded of another story too. I had friends in Prague. After 1968, when the Warsaw Pact invaded Prague…

FL: Many Polish soldiers were in the Warsaw Pact army.

GO: Yes, it’s unbelievable. A short period of liberalisation followed an invasion. In 1977, the famous Charter 77 was founded. Many prominent artists declared they wouldn’t visit Czechoslovakia – Leonard Bernstein, Rafael Kubelík and many others. I asked my Prague-based friends from the music industry – I was very popular there back then – if I should come perform next spring. They told me they’d understand if I didn’t, but that it would just be letting their government win. After all, the official line was that everything Western was evil. ‘But we love you,’ they said, ‘so come and perform for us because music is something Czechs love the most. If you don’t come, it will mean even less contact with the outside world.’

You’re good at asking questions that bring back my memories, but I’m not too good at actually answering them!

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Garrick Ohlsson, photo: Mariusz Szyperko /PAP

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FL: In the world of culture, there’s an ongoing debate about removing Russian works from repertoires.

GO: I don’t like that approach even though I understand it. I don’t think we should cut ties with Russian classics – music, literature, theatre. If the war in Vietnam had been waged by England, would the entire world have banned Shakespeare? It sounds silly. Is the art somehow tainted? In the contemporary world, the problem is that not only does the artwork need to be good, but the artist has to be a wonderful person too… Hitler and Stalin liked music, but that doesn’t make the music they listened to worthless. What’s your opinion?

FL: The way I think about it is from the angle of decolonising a repertoire. Russian culture is sometimes truly beautiful, but it’s also a part of the cultural politics of the Russian Federation (and it has been since the Soviet period, perhaps even the Tsarist era). Meanwhile, Ukrainian music is virtually absent in international repertoires, much like the art of the other nations that were colonised by Russia.

GO: That’s true, we don’t hear Ukrainian music in international concert halls. Perhaps there isn’t as much Ukrainian music as there is Russian or Polish, but I’m sure there’s much more than what we can hear today.

FL: Russian music won’t lose anything if it’s not performed for a few years. But artists from countries that were hurt by Russian imperialism have something to gain.

GO: Yes, the scale of colonisation and repression of other cultures is enormous, even nowadays. It’s true, an attempt to bring some balance would be a very good thing. If we don’t listen to Tchaikovsky’s symphonies or Boris Godunov for a while, I don’t think we’ll forget them. But I wouldn’t want to put a curse on anyone.

It’s another complicated issue! In America, all of this has a strange undertone – Rachmaninoff is performed because he wrote beautiful music and remains a popular composer. We are much more international, especially in terms of music – everything we have is imported.

However it might sound, we benefited from the catastrophes that shook 20th-century Europe – the terror of Hitler and Stalin, and poverty. We were a young strong country that attracted talented artists. It was already like that in the 19th century – for instance, Tchaikovsky and Dvořák came to America. Dvořák even became the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York.

Paradoxically enough, after WWII, when I was growing up, American orchestras played Russian, German and French music almost exactly the same as it was played in Europe. Maybe it wasn’t identical, but it was certainly similar enough. We’re very skilful at putting on costumes, as we don’t have one dominant national tradition. We don’t think of music in national terms. We know that Rachmaninoff was Russian and Chopin was Polish, but we don’t feel it as deeply.

In Poland, I was often asked: ‘How can you play Chopin so beautifully? You’re not Polish.’ I always replied that Chopin is the most beloved composer in the world. Every piano teacher out there considers him ‘their’ composer. If you don’t feel something for Chopin, don’t even come near me! (laughs)

FL: Thinking about music in terms of nationality is linked to Romanticism.

GO: I discovered Romanticism as an intellectual movement through music – music has always expanded my horizons. Chopin was the first truly national composer. The big four – Italy, France, England and Germany – had the colonising power in music, but it was Chopin, an artist from exotic Poland, who became a European icon.

I think it’s difficult to truly grasp how alien he was in his time, especially when he used Polish elements (most importantly, mazurkas and modal harmony). His work was truly exotic – not like the Far East or colourful Arabia, but still exotic. After him came Glinka, Grieg, Liszt, Dvořák, Smetana…
When I was a teenager – it might seem funny that I used to be a teenager – I preferred Liszt. I thought Chopin’s work was pretty, but I found some weird excitement in Liszt’s work. (Ohlsson starts to make sounds resembling howling.) But when I learned more about Chopin’s work, I noticed Liszt was missing something. I went down a similar road when it came to Romantic opera: first I discovered Richard Strauss, then Richard Wagner. I love the noise of a Strauss orchestra! It’s orgiastic, truly marvellous. But later I realised that Wagner’s world has things you won’t find in Strauss’s work.

My favourite excerpt of Romantic patriotism (or nationalism, even) is Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat Major – it’s not focused on animosity, it doesn’t depict an ‘us versus them’ world, but at the same time it’s very emotional. The piece shows human nature in all its complexity, an optimistic triumph accompanied by suffering. It’s not a picture frequently painted by Romantic music.

Take Wagner – the splendour of his music rolls over you like a steamroller, it almost kills you. It’s exciting too, but it’s a different side of humanity. One that’s very thrilling, I admit – even though I don’t really feel good about myself when I say that.

FL: You’ve been visiting Poland for half a century now. How has the Chopin Competition changed throughout that time?

GO: The Chopin Competition is my home. I’ve always paid attention to it, although to varying degrees. I always know who’s won and who’s made a name for themselves at the National Philharmonic. Today I can watch the livestream, but even back in the 1970s, the competition was meticulously documented – Polish people have a knack for media, even in difficult times. When I had a small documentary made about me, we were looking for archival materials. We found them in Poland, even though I had no idea those recordings still existed.

It’s the same with the recordings – it’s astonishing that even though Poland was a relatively poor country back then, recordings of all 12 competition finalists were released on vinyl by the record label Polskie Nagrania almost immediately after the results were announced. That never could’ve happened in a capitalist country…

FL: Polskie Nagrania was bought up by Warner Music in 2015.

GO: Everything is being bought up nowadays… Still, the ability to livestream the competition on the Internet is truly delightful.

Back to your initial question: how has the competition changed? I most notice the change in where the participants are from. In the past, most pianists were from Central and Eastern Europe. There were some exceptions, like Fou Ts'ong, who was a special case, as he received his education in Poland.

A few decades later, East Asian pianists started to dominate – Japanese, Chinese, Korean. Interest in European music grew in those countries at the beginning of the 20th century. We’re now seeing the 9th or 10th generation of Japanese pianists educated in the Western style. They don’t have to go abroad now to get a complex music education.

In the 1970s, when I heard pianists from Germany, France and Russia, I could recognise them by their style. Some stylistic elements were very visible in their piano-playing. Americans were less distinctive, but most of us had Russian teachers (Russian, not Soviet).

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Warsaw, October 1970. Garrick Ohlsson (the competition winner), receiving the award from the jury chairman, Professor Kazimierz Sikorski, at the 8th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw (October 7-21, 1970). Photo: Mariusz Szyperko/PAP.

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FL: Russian Romantics.

GO: Yes, old-school Romantics… Growing up in New York, I attended concerts by Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz and other pianists educated at the beginning of the century. It was the piano playing of grand concert halls. When I was a juror in 2015, I couldn’t tell where the pianists were from. Those national schools are almost completely extinct.

When I was young, people would say that young pianists who won contests weren’t real artists – they were just agile and had dexterous fingers but nothing in their hearts. You hear people saying the same thing today.

In the 1970s, the outstanding Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha came to New York. We knew each other quite well and decided to go see a young pianist’s debut recital together. It was fantastic, even though he played too quickly and too loudly. You could say his piano-playing had a bit too much of everything. His performance was strongly criticised in the New York Times, which made de Larrocha really angry.

‘He’s 20 years old. When’s he supposed to play like that? When he’s over 80?’ she complained. ‘Give it a rest – this is what life’s all about!’

My entire generation was accused of lacking a heart, a soul, a brain – blah blah blah. Today, the technique of young pianists has improved unimaginably, and I’d say that my own generation was already more skilful than our predecessors. More and more performers explored complicated repertoires, and we played not just quickly but maturely.

FL: Are there particular aesthetic tendencies we can point to in young pianists today?

GO: We’ve grown up – I’m talking mostly about my musical grandchildren here – in a world where recordings and urtext editions are readily available. We live in an era of impeccability. Young pianists often fear stepping away from the ideal even just a little bit, but we need to face the truth. The notion of ideal is utopian, perhaps even false. We’re striving for perfection, but no one will truly achieve it, though some might get close. The era of purity has been a reaction to the exuberant piano-playing of the Romantic period.

In the 19th century, editors ‘corrected’ sheet music so that it was more ‘proper’. Chopin’s work suffered in particular. My first piano teacher gave me an edition of Chopin’s ballads published in England in the 1930s – Ballade No. 1 in G minor is missing that famous chord that comes right after the fantastic mind-shattering dissonance. It’s not there because it was considered ‘wrong’ – they thought there was no way a distinguished composer like Chopin could have allowed such brutal dissonance…

I feel like many young pianists today are afraid to show their personality. Notation and precision are very important in music, but there’s a lot that remains between the notes – and that’s true for every art form, every language. Music is much more than the printed sheet. A talented pianist who plays every note very precisely is always playing something more than just the notes you can see on paper. But objectivity is impossible. Fear of the slightest transgression is particularly visible in competitions (by the way, it does seem like the number of competitions in the world has gotten somewhat overwhelming). At the back of their mind, they’re always afraid of the jury’s reaction: will introducing a bit of nuance be taken badly? It’s a dead end that discourages artists from being natural. After all, each member of the jury has their own expectations about a piece, and it’s impossible to please everyone.

The American conductor Michael Tilson, whom I talked to recently, put it into words perfectly. While he was giving a masterclass at the Juilliard School, one of the young pianists asked him: ‘Maestro, how much freedom do I have in my interpretation?’ Tilson told him it was complicated. That your freedom is based on how well you understand the music, how you play, what you know about music, what your teachers told you, what you yourself feel… You should search for your own freedom, but if you’re a real musician, you’ll feel bad when you overuse it. You don’t have to ask your professor their opinion, you need to know what you yourself deem good. I think every good and well-known musician is able to handle that task. It’s obvious that you can’t use too much pink when making a Rembrandt – it won’t fit the rest of the work.

FL: You mentioned access to recordings.

GO: In the YouTube era, the young have access to recordings that my generation could never have even dreamed of. When we came to the Chopin Competition in 1970, two critics – Jan Weber and Józef Kański – played us shellac recordings of Polish pre-war pianists. All of them, starting with Aleksander Michałowski, we’d never heard of before. We didn’t love everything we heard, but we were exposed to something new. It helped us understand that there once was a different world in piano-playing.

Today, anyone can listen to those recordings for free. It’s fantastic, but also poses a certain threat: you might end up flitting from one thing to another. You take one idea from Ignacy Friedman, another from Rachmaninoff. On the other hand, isn’t that what we all do? I know pianists who claim they don’t listen to recordings at all, but they’re in the minority.

FL: Who are your favourite pianists from the past?

GO: I admire many, especially those who play completely differently from me. Arthur Rubinstein was my first hero. He was admired by teacher Rosina Lhévinne – the wife and student of Josef Lhévinne, who came to the US after the October Revolution. Rubinstein was a Berlin-educated Pole, but those pianists created one cultural universe together – a huge, old-fashioned space of culture and art. The wonderful sound of Rubinstein and his generous piano-playing has always given me great joy.

I admire Rachmaninoff and Józef Hofmann. There’s something uncanny about the latter – there’s no one quite like him in the history of phonography. He had a different position from other pianists, just like Mozart had a different position from other composers. In theory, he was an ordinary man, but I’ve no idea how he was able to play like that… It’s not that all of his interpretations are perfectly to my taste, but that’s not the point. He was like a bird that flew higher than others. I also really enjoy listening to Alfred Cortot, even though our temperaments differ a lot. I can’t really say why I like him so much. Cortot just had an amazing ability to transmit music.

FL: In an extended interview published by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, you talked about the most important concert you’d ever experienced: a performance by Rubinstein. I’d like to ask you about your most important concerts outside of classical music.

GO: My most important concert memories are linked to the world of classical music, opera and orchestra. But I’ve been to other shows too. I’d often go see concerts at Fillmore East with my friends. We listened to popular rock bands, which to me felt like being a part of something important and exciting. It was a completely alien atmosphere for me. I wasn’t a wild kid, and there were quite a lot of drugs there.

My best friend in middle school was a huge fan of American folk music. He wanted me to learn how to improvise, but I wasn’t very good at it… We went to see different shows, including Peter, Paul and Mary, and Judy Collins. Collins was heavenly, I loved the show. But none of these experiences ever moved me as deeply as those grand classical music concerts.

I don’t really listen much for pleasure, as I’m very focused when I listen to music. I have friends who listen to records all day, but I couldn’t do that. After I practice for several hours, I don’t feel like listening to music. Enough is enough.

FL: Do you ever dream of music?

GO: Yes, I do. When I was very young, I had a recurring dream about Rubinstein. I dreamed I was sitting at a huge Steinway onstage wearing the same tailcoat that Rubinstein wore. It’s a full house and I don’t know the piece I’m about to play... It’s a classic dream about being unprepared. It recurred in different variations. It wasn’t really a nightmare, more a symptom of anxiety.

Sometimes I dream of heavenly music, but when I wake up, I can’t remember any of it.

Interview conducted in English then translated into Polish, March 2023, translated back into English, August 2025

Language English

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