Like any artform, music is about discovering existing relationships and forging new ones. Víkingur Ólafsson’s restless, imaginative approach to programming, particularly when the works of primarily two composers – Chopin and Bach or Debussy and Rameau, for example – are juxtaposed, ensures both kinds of relationships are addressed. The results are never less than revelatory.

Ólafsson’s latest release is no exception. Here, he dwells on the connections between the music of JS Bach and Beethoven – and, thanks to “a faint memory from my teenage music school days in Reykjavík,” those between Beethoven and Schubert, specifically between the former’s Sonata No. 27 in E minor Op. 90 and the latter’s Piano Sonata in E minor D566.

The work which gives the album its title is however Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30 in E minor Op. 109, whose final movement, a “grand, awe-inspiring” set of variations, feels to Ólafsson “like a deeply felt homage to the Goldberg Variations.” Here, we find the true inspiration for this album: after spending a year performing little more than the Goldbergs, Ólafsson was, for his next recording project, “immediately drawn to a set of works where I felt the presence of the Goldberg Variations in the most inspiring way: the last three sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, Opp. 109, 110 and 111.”

Wisely, Ólafsson has chosen to record each on separate albums. On this occasion, in terms of length and heft, he’s balanced Op. 109 with Bach’s similarly “late” Partita No. 6 in E minor, BWV830; he’s also bookended the program with the E major prelude from Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier at one end and the gorgeous Sarabande from the French Suite No. 6 in E, BWV817.

The two two-movement works, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 27 and the Schubert, sound very well indeed together, with Ólafsson pointing up the more classical, Haydnesque qualities of the Beethoven and the nascent Romanticism of the Schubert. By using the Bach Partita as a caesura of sorts, and by zeroing in on the work’s “Romanticism” in the Toccata and the classical poise and balance of its multiple dance movements, he also invites us to make novel connections of our own between all three composers.

The main course is however undoubtedly Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30, and especially the set of variations comprising its final Andante molto cantabile ed espressivo movement. For it is here that “just as in Bach’s great work, the opening theme is a graceful sarabande that embarks on a wild journey of transformation, reaching metaphysical heights of virtuosic keyboard writing.”

Here, as indeed throughout all three movements, Ólafsson is less reverential, more exploratory, searching, in precisely the same way as not just Beethoven but Bach was. Clarity and expressiveness are achieved through an extraordinary breadth of variety of articulation and agogic accents rather than overt lyricism. In this, Ólafsson is very much in the philosophical, Igor Levit vein when it comes to Beethoven, whilst his finely etched Partita No. 6 recalls the similarly thoughtful harpsichord version by Mahan Esfahani, whose rippling sonorities serve to emphasis Bach’s masterly architecture.

Listen on Apple Music

Title: Opus 109
Works: Music by Beethoven, Bach and Schubert
Performer: Víkingur Ólafsson p
Label: DG 4867411 (2CD)