Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson wins the Limelight 2021 Instrumental Recording of the Year with his album Mozart & Contemporaries. This album is the shimmering follow-up to last year’s award-­winning coupling of Debussy and Rameau (DG 4860525). Rebecca Franks awarded it five stars, declaring, ​“it bears all the now-­familiar Ólafsson hallmarks: that distinctive sound; those imaginative programming touches; the sense that the music is both timeless and freshly minted.”

“Ólafsson sounds utterly at home and natural in the studio. There’s warmth and clarity in the recording that allows his playing to flourish; the tone is almost plain, yet deceptively so, as the result is beautiful and intimate . . . This unmissable recording ends with Liszt. Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus is not only transcribed, but transformed and transfigured. This is music that points to the heavens and the stars.”