Víkingur Ólafsson launches CONTINUUM II, a new album of music by J.S. Bach
First single – Ólafsson’s arrangement of the Air on the G String –
released 17 July: watch here / stream here
Album released on Deutsche Grammophon: 13 November 2026
For more than thirty years, Víkingur Ólafsson has played a little Bach every day. “Bach has become my diary,” says the pianist. “Playing his music is the one constant in my life.” That lifelong conversation continues with CONTINUUM II, the second instalment of his acclaimed CONTINUUM project and the first album to be recorded entirely in his new Icelandic home studio, The Nutshell. Bringing together original keyboard works alongside new arrangements and transcriptions, CONTINUUM II will be released by Deutsche Grammophon digitally, on CD and vinyl on 13 November 2026. The first single – Ólafsson’s own arrangement of Bach’s Air on the G String (grand piano version) – is released on 17 July, followed by the Larghetto from the Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D major, BWV 972 (after Vivaldi), on 14 August.
Ólafsson comments: “I have never had the stamina to keep a journal for longer than a few weeks. But for over thirty years, I have played a little Bach on the piano every day. It is the one constant factor in my life, no matter what else is going on. Playing his music is a way of putting your particular experience into context with the universal. Even your location in time and space becomes a little trivial. Bach wrote some of his greatest works for a very small audience in a time when he was considered behind the times, a man of the past. As we know now, it turns out he was writing for all of us, for the future. When I play Bach, I am reminded that historical eras in music are notions we superimpose on what is essentially a continuum: an unbroken thread linking us all, a running stream flowing through us – what the Germans, incidentally, call a Bach. This recording project is called Continuum. It is my personal Bach journal, an ongoing conversation with his music and a tribute to his art.”
Ólafsson released the first volume of CONTINUUM in October 2024 and, since then, has won his first GRAMMY Award® for his recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, surpassed one billion streams worldwide – half of them from Bach repertoire – and built The Nutshell: a teak-walled, fully remote recording studio beneath his home in Iceland.
On turning forty, Ólafsson began thinking about what he wanted the next decade of his life to look like. One answer was the freedom to record with complete spontaneity. “If the urge strikes,” he explains, “I can simply wander downstairs late at night in my pyjamas, press a couple of buttons, and start recording.”
That spirit shapes CONTINUUM II. As his first true “album domesticum”, it centres on music associated with the home: intimate, reflective works that reveal Bach at his most personal. At its heart are six chorales that Ólafsson plays on the piano, including Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 436; Welt, ade!, BWV 27/VI; and Es ist genug, BWV 60/V.
“I haven’t come across them recorded on the piano,” he notes. “But to me they seem newly revealed in that medium. I particularly love how they sound in the fragile sonority of the upright piano.”
It was producer Christopher Tarnow who suggested including an arrangement of the early organ chorale prelude Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott. “I have to admit I had never heard this work before. Bach wrote it when he was around twenty years old, and the first time I played it I immediately realised it was the kind of music that stays with you for the rest of your life. Its desolate beauty, its impossibly unpredictable harmonic progression, its lamentoso spirit that almost feels like a nineteenth-century lied… We don’t know what’s around the next corner, but we want Bach to hold our hand and take us there. It is the sort of work I never want to end once I begin playing it.”
For the album, Ólafsson recorded both grand and upright piano versions of his own arrangement of Bach’s Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3, better known as the Air on the G String. He dedicated the score to György Kurtág as a gift for the composer’s 100th birthday earlier this year.
The programme also includes the Largo from the Keyboard Concerto No. 5 in F minor; Ólafsson’s arrangement of the Adagio from the Violin Sonata No.5 in F minor for piano, string quartet and double bass, performed with the Siggi String Quartet and bassist Xun Yang; and the Larghetto from the Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D major, arranged by Bach himself from a Vivaldi original.
Completing the programme – and encapsulating the intimate, domestic spirit of CONTINUUM II – are six of the short preludes Bach wrote as practice pieces for his pupils, including his own children. Their brevity, Ólafsson suggests, conceals remarkable depth.
“Each is an inspired miniature, a complete musical world in itself. Recorded here on the grand piano, they remind me that some of Bach’s most profound thoughts are also among his most compact.”
The artist’s acclaimed collaboration with Olafur Eliasson – his performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at Lucerne Festival PULSE, accompanied by Eliasson’s immersive real-time light installation – will stream worldwide on STAGE+ from 18 July.
Other forthcoming highlights include Bach, Beethoven and Schubert recitals at the Edinburgh International Festival (22 August) and three at London’s Wigmore Hall (10-12 September); a European tour of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Santtu-Matias Rouvali taking in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Lucerne Festival, Grafenegg Festival and Philharmonie de Paris (26 August-3 September); the world premiere of Mark Simpson’s Piano Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner at London’s Royal Festival Hall (23 October); a recital tour of South Korea, China and Taiwan in October and November, as well as Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko in Baden-Baden (4 December).