Everyone laughs, and then someone in the audience mumbles: “In five years he'll be Prime Minister of Iceland.

At least! ”Vikingur Ólafsson had just jumped up in the middle of Mozart's D minor fantasy and made a gag about having come to play Mozart's“ new pieces ”.

There is a lot of laughter at this concert evening.

The Icelander keeps saying what he is interpreting and how, playing a few bars, chatting, then playing a few other bars extra wrong and explaining why you shouldn't do it that way.

Of course, there are no new pieces by Mozart, but there is a new album by pianist Vikingur Ólafsson. And even if the notes he plays on are around two hundred and thirty years old, it sounds very fresh and new. Vikingur Ólafsson: head, round black glasses, turtleneck sweater and jacket. He's standing straight at the piano, grinning a little, a showmaster. A picture like from the Italian L'Uomo Vogue.

His fourth album is now being released by the traditional label Deutsche Grammophon, following Philip Glass, JS Bach, and Debussy / Rameau, this time the Icelandic pianist is dedicated to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. So again a very big topic in music history, the birth of classical music. “I always withdraw for six months and just read and play,” explains Ólafsson in an interview. For months he digged into biographies, studied the composer's epoch, played all of his notes - or at least a lot more than what ends up on the album. For the record “Mozart & Contemporaries” he also studied contemporaries of Mozart and took pieces by Baldassare Galuppi, Domenico Cimarosa, Joseph Haydn and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach with him into the eighty-four minutes of the album. Everything serves one goal: to understand Mozart. The composer,who was himself a pianist and of whom we maintain a caricature today and who is also not particularly popular in the current concert scene.

A kidnapping into the world of classical music

Ólafsson is thirty-seven years old, two years older than Mozart was at all.

Ólafsson began to play Mozart when he was five, when Ólafsson attended an opera for the first time when he was seven, it was of course the “Magic Flute”.

Today, Mozart is usually imagined as a playful child prodigy - Miloš Forman's film “Amadeus” made sure of that.

But in the last ten years of his life, the Salzburg native was under pressure from many sides and had phases of depression.

The music we hear from Mozart today, however, comes almost exclusively from this period.

From years in which he struggled for personal freedom.

Fights against resistance.

Mozart marries Constanze Weber;

his father Leopold, who was also his most important teacher, does not come to the wedding;

he disapproves of the association.