Garrick Ohlsson/Ronald Smith

Making his name as master interpreter of the music of Frederic Chopin, virtuoso pianist Garrick Ohlsson also turned his hand to Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninov, while he also worked with singers such as Magda Olivero, Jessye Norman and Ewa Podles.

Born in New York City, he was initially inspired by seeing Arthur Rubinstein in concert and started studying at the Juilliard School at the age of 13 before later being mentored by the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau. In 1970, at the height of the Cold War, he became the first American to win the Gold Medal at the prestigious International Chopin Competition in Warsaw and, despite still being in his early twenties, he quickly established himself as one of the world's leading performers of the legendary Polish composer's work. A big, powerful man known for his accurate, elegant technique, Ohlsson guested with the top orchestras across the world and recorded pieces by Liszt, Schubert and Brahms for EMI, before later going on to record a ten-album set of Beethoven's sonatas for Bridge Records. The third volume of that project won him the Grammy Award for Best Instrumentalist Solo Performance in 2008. More recently he recorded pieces by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin on 'Complete Poemes' in 2015 and took on the Czech polkas of Bedrich Smetana on 'Dances On the Seashore' in 2016.