Alice Sara Ott ECHOES OF LIFE

 

ECHOES OF LIFE

Alice Sara Ott NIGHTFALL

On her new album Nightfall, Alice Sara Ott takes a very personal look at the magical moment in time and space between day and night, light and darkness, basing her explorations on works by Debussy, Satie and Ravel. The German-Japanese pianist decided to mark the dual celebration of her 30th birthday and her 10th anniversary as a Deutsche Grammophon artist by examining her relationship with three French composers who have had a significant influence on her, and whose music made an indelible impression on the Parisian arts scene at the turn of the 20th century. With meticulous attention to detail, she traces the shifting moods in these works, revealing the fascinating interplay of the light and dark tones used by Debussy, Satie and Ravel to create such wide-ranging atmospheres.

Ending and beginning, transparency and opacity. As day turns to night and light fades into darkness, we enter the blue hour of twilight, when the air seems full of mystery, fleetingly saturated in blue and purple hues before inexorably darkening to blackness. It is precisely this elusive change in atmosphere that Alice Sara Ott sets out to capture in musical terms on Nightfall. The album is a particularly personal artistic project for Alice Sara Ott, documenting the intensity of her musical encounters with these three composers.

Debussy, Satie and Ravel were contemporaries, and all three lived, worked and died in Paris. They were friends, but also rivals, each writing in his own very individual style. As a result, we hear the contrast between the dreaminess of Debussy’s Rêverie (1890), written when the young composer was still in search of his own stylistic ideas; the dark, romantic and intricate storytelling of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908); and the minimalistic snapshots of Satie’s Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes (1888–90). Debussy’s dance-based Suite bergamasque was published in 1905, and Ott sees its most famous movement, “Clair de lune” – inspired by the Verlaine poem of the same name – as reflecting the way people don masks of happiness to disguise their pain. As for Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte of 1899, she suggests it may be about the quest for eternal youth.
This album gives us a glimpse of the artist’s thought process, which goes beyond consideration of the musico-historical significance of the works in question, beyond her artistic interpretation of the scores and her desire for technical perfection. On a higher, more abstract level, her readings of the shimmering ambiguities central to these works mirror the dichotomy of all human emotions, as well as shining a light on her personal fascination with the psychological fissures and contradictions that mark each and every one of us, and which are just as hard to capture as the changing moods of the complex, filigree music of Debussy, Satie and Ravel.

Alice Sara Ott WONDERLAND

On her new album Alice Sara Ott takes us into the world of mountain trolls and elves, hills and fjords through a selection of Grieg’s works – his Lyric Pieces, as well as through selected piano versions of pieces from the Peer Gynt Suites, and one of the most famous works of piano literature: Grieg’s piano concerto in A minor, for which she teams up with one of the top orchestras, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, under star conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at a live recording. Alice has always been fascinated by the fantasy world Grieg has created and the fairy tale like characters that lend the title to Grieg’s musical miniatures: “This album represents my own very personal journey through Grieg’s ‘wonderland’. I should like to take this opportunity to invite you to leave behind your everyday lives for a moment and enter Edvard Grieg’s magical and imaginary world with me. Without our really noticing it, we are taken on a journey into a daydream, a ‘wonderland’ from which we return only reluctantly to our own everyday reality.” (Deutsche Grammophon)

Ólafur Arnalds / Alice Sara Ott THE CHOPIN PROJECT

Classical music has always been very much about performance and interpretation - about that moment, in concert, when the performer interprets the composer s music in his own way. Then recording technology came along, and in classical it was all about capturing the live performance in the most accurate way. But I believe that when music has been channeled through all the machinery and processes that are part of making a recording, it is no longer all about that moment. It can t be. The act of recording becomes a ghost performer in itself, reflecting on the result in a way that is often unaccounted for or ignored.
While The Beatles dragged pop music along by starting to use the recording technology as a part of the composition and performance, classical music was left to still somehow aim for the impossible. And the idea of what is considered an accurate and true sound became an unbreakable norm in itself.
This norm never made much sense to me. Why not use the technology we have as not only a tool, but a part of the actual interpretation? Why can t the microphones, the room - the sound - also be a performer? Why would all of these factors need to stay invisible behind the norm of a true recording sound? And why would a good classical piano sound naturally have to be the silvery, brilliant concert grand sound that we have on classical recordings today, while we know that the pianos of the 19th century sounded so very different?
All these are norms that I was interested to test. Alice was the perfect partner in this project. Her recording of Chopin s Waltzes has been a true inspiration for me. We spent a week exploring different microphones, pianos and venues all over Reykjavik, trying to find the perfect constellation for each of her interpretations. And then I tried to put them in a new context with my own recompositions, based on themes from Chopin s pieces. I wanted to make a dynamic and modern album with the originals and recompositions melting together to create one arc, one coherent storyline.
Chopin's music has a very special meaning for me. When I was younger I was playing drums in various metal bands and all I wanted to listen to was punk and heavy metal music. But whenever I visited my grandmother, which I did frequently, she would always make me listen to Chopin. If it had been my parents forcing classical music down my throat at that time of my life I probably would have puked on their face. But I guess out of respect for my grandmother I always listened with her and slowly it started to grow on me.
My last moment with my grandmother was on her deathbed, she was just lying there, old and sick, but very happy and proud. And I sat with her and we listened to a Chopin sonata. Then I kissed her goodbye and left. She passed away a few hours later.
At that point I was already studying classical composition and experimenting, releasing and touring with all kinds of classically inspired music. But Chopin always kept this special place in my heart and I wanted to express that by making his music the center of this project. By looking at his music in a different way, through the prism of recording technique in its different facets and through my own compositions, I didn't intend to question the integrity of Chopin's music. I wanted to find my very personal interpretation, like so many other great musicians have done before me. (Ólafur Arnalds)

Alice Sara Ott / Francesco Tristano SCANDALE

The disc’s title and raison d’être escape me: ‘Scandale’ says the cover in shocking pink. The ‘Rite of Spring’ premiere is presumably the eponymous ‘scandale’, but Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade? Ravel’s La valse? Rimsky’s widow objected fiercely to Diaghilev using the former as a ballet and Ravel never spoke to the impresario again after he refused to turn it into a ballet. Hardly scandals. The booklet bleats about both performers being ‘keen to return to a starting point that is free from expectations and in doing so they allow themselves – scandalously so – to create something entirely new’.

Better to ignore such waffle and enjoy these dance pieces at face value, the performances and recording of which are terrific. If it is hard to forget Stravinsky’s orchestration, the sections of motoric rhythm in his two-piano version of The Rite seem made for the percussive character of the instrument, while some of the slower passages reveal more so than in their original garb the challenging harmonic language that so provoked the first audiences. ‘The Kalender Prince’ by Stravinsky’s teacher in his own duet version provides lyrical contrast before La valse, deftly, brilliantly executed, the final pages more dogged and relentless than the increasingly frantic view taken by the thrilling Argerich and her many different waltzing partners. The final piece is the world premiere of Tristano’s A Soft Shell Groove which, with its foot-tapping (literally) rhythm, is bound to find many friends among listeners and other two-piano teams. (Gramophone)