The Emperor and The Organ

Thursday, December 1 at 8 p.m.  

The Kravis Center for the Performing Arts

Hailed by The Washington Post as “one of the great American pianists,” Garrick Ohlsson joins Maestro Gerard Schwarz and the Palm Beach Symphony to perform Beethoven’s last piano concerto, Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 73, known as “Emperor,” featuring the trademark grandeur of the composer’s heroic period. Palm Beach Symphony opens the program with Sibelius’ atmospheric Night Ride and Sunrise, Op. 55 and closes it as it revels in the popular orchestral showcase of Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 78popularly known as the “Organ Symphony.”

‍

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition (where he remains the single American to have won the Gold Medal), Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. With the reopening of concert activity in the U.S. in summer 2021 he appeared with the Indianapolis and Cleveland orchestras, in a recital in San Francisco, in the Brevard Festival and four Brahms recitals at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival. The 21-22 season began with the KBS, in Seoul followed by Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle symphonies, BBC Glasgow and European orchestras in Prague, Hamburg, Lyon and St. Petersburg. In recital he can be heard in Los Angeles, Houston, Kansas City as well as Poland, Germany and England. A GRAMMY winner, Ohlsson has also been honored with the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the 2014 recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music and in August 2018 the Polish Deputy Culture Minister awarded him with the Gloria Artis Gold Medal for cultural merit. The Seattle Times reported, “What a sound! Ohlsson is famous for that great sonority, though he never seems to be working very hard to produce it. There are no histrionics, no flailing or thumping or grand standing, just an incredible technique with razor-sharp accuracy, producing a sound so lush it almost glistens.”