Heavenly boring piano playing by Vikingur Ólafsson ★★☆☆☆

An evening listening to Mozart is usually not a punishment, but invite the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Ólafsson to come and copy his recent album about Mozart and contemporaries, and two sensations are fighting for priority in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. How wonderfully beautiful he plays. How terribly boring he plays.

The beauty is in tones that float through the Great Hall like lanterns. From the keyboard, Ólafsson (38) makes them rise weightless and glowing. His left fingers shyly explore the keys, serving all the beauty that the right hand has in store. Think miraculously molded rhythms, or melodies whose final note is agonizingly delayed.

The boring is in monotony. take a Rondo by Mozart’s hero Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. He wrote a piece of rapidly changing moods, restless and nervous. But seeing so much emotion, Ólafsson acts like the ancient innkeeper Procrustes. Can someone not fit in my bed? Then we stretch a leg here and cleave a neck there.

It is allowed, because art is free. But there is a downside. Vikingur Olafssón sucks everything out of the music that 18th-century people have put into it for fun and tears. Thus becomes Mozart, the adventurer who uses the cheerful canon Leck mich im Arsch wrote, who explored unsavory depths in his operas, a choirboy who sings the same tune over and over.

It remains that Ólafsson talked his performance together sympathetically, and as a salute to the victims in Ukraine a beautiful Ave Maria played from his unknown compatriot Sigvaldi Kaldalóns.