About
Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretative and technical prowess. Although he has long been regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Mr Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Mr Ohlsson is noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. His concerto repertoire alone is unusually wide and eclectic, and he has at his command some eighty concertos.
Mr Ohlsson is an avid chamber musician who has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Takács and Tokyo string quartets, among other ensembles. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based FOG Trio.
A prolific recording artist, Mr Ohlsson can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, Bridge, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc and Virgin Classics labels. He has recorded the complete Beethoven sonatas for Bridge Records, the third volume of which won a Grammy Award. His sixteen-disc set of the complete works of Chopin, originally recorded for Arabesque, was re-released by Hyperion.
A native of White Plains, N.Y., Garrick Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of eight. He attended the Westchester Conservatory of Music and at thirteen entered The Juilliard School in New York City. 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 1968 Montréal Piano Competition, it was his 1970 triumph at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where he won the Gold Medal, that brought him worldwide recognition. Since then he has made nearly a dozen tours of Poland, where he retains immense personal popularity. Mr Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He makes his home in San Francisco.
