'When I play Mozart, I very often feel that the ink has just dried on the page, that the music has just been written' - so says Víkingur Ólafsson reflecting on his new album.

It's this extraordinary quality to his playing that defines the Icelandic pianist and former Gramophone Artist of the Year. When Gramophone profiled Ólafsson ahead of his last album, we wrote: 'What always strikes me about this remarkable young pianist’s playing is that everything he performs (be it Bach, Debussy or Philip Glass) feels somehow, and movingly, contemporary, of our own time, as if that’s all it ever can be – as if it could thus be played no other way.'

As Ólafsson himself put it in that feature: 'I see all music as contemporary music, I don’t make a distinction.'

Contemporary is a theme that runs through Ólafsson's new album - both his personal relationship with the music he's performing, but also in that he's placed some of his favourite Mozart pieces for piano among those of the composer's contemporaries, including CPE Bach, Joseph Haydn, Baldassare Galuppi and Domenico Cimarosa. It's due for release on Deutsche Grammophon on September 3 - but you can hear an advance track released today below, and beneath that watch a trailer for the new album.

 ‘I see all music as contemporary music – I don’t make a distinction’ Read Gramophone's Víkingur Ólafsson interview from April 2021