James Naughtie meets…
Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter
Anne Sofie von Otter is in enthusiastic mood when we meet in Hamburg. She is singing Countess Geschwitz in Berg’s Lulu, staged by one of her favourite opera directors, Christoph Marthaler. She wants most of all to talk about intelligence in music.
It’s a production that she has enjoyed because Marthaler hasn’t been interested in fiddly stagecraft, but in the revelation of character. ‘It would be so boring if every time somebody said “you’re scratching your nose” you were scratching your nose. Marthaler doesn’t bother with that. ‘You could say it’s static but people are really living the thought they are singing about. The tension is huge, and the audience feels it. I am with him 100 per cent and I want to do it his way. I tune into him.’
So, as we speak in the Hamburg Staatsoper, she’s keen to talk about new recordings, new music and new partnerships. Now in her sixties, she has had a career that has scaled the heights of opera and the recital repertoire, but there is no feeling that she might be slowing down. She talks about disciplining herself to take care of the voice, but the search for new musical experiences goes on.
Our conversation ranges from the strange lack of technique among many young singers, to German cabaret songs, Kate Bush and Elvis Costello, Hugo Wolf and Schubert, how she’s enjoyed recording a disc for voice and organ, and the challenge and satisfaction of working with composer Thomas Adès.
And naturally, because of where we are, we discuss the new concert hall in Hamburg, the Elbphilharmonie, where we’re both due that evening to hear a concert conducted by Esa-pekka Salonen. It’s a building that is enlivening cultural life in this vibrant city, for so long one of the great northern trading ports. Jutting into the harbour like a looming ship and perched above fine old brick warehouses, it’s a thrilling sight on the skyline, and the hall inside is one of the most satisfying you could wish for – comfortable, with a stylish simplicity and an acoustic that reminds you of what London is missing. Anne Sofie is as excited as I am to hear it for the first time, and to have an experience of a building that has welcomed a million visitors, no less, since it opened to the public in November, six weeks before the first concert in January.
So it’s natural that she should be brimming with enthusiasm for the breadth of the music making she now enjoys. The only problem, she says, is the conservatism of some promoters who still expect her to deliver the Schubert-mahler programmes in which she’s excelled for so long.
Instead, she wants to build on some of the partnerships she’s made in recent times which have taken her in new directions. I ask about
the disc, So Many Things, she recorded with the New York string quartet Brooklyn Rider which seemed, as first, an unlikely match. They perform songs by, among others, John Adams, Kate Bush, Nico Muhly and Björk. So how did it come about?
Her answer is quite practical. ‘Well, I wanted a recording of songs like these – an orchestra was too expensive and the piano too limited, so a string quartet was good for all kinds of reasons.
‘Someone told me about this particular string quartet, Brooklyn Rider, who I found to be really wonderful, very cutting edge, and doing a lot of contemporary music. I listened to what they had recorded with a real rhythmic groove. They’re young enough and hungry enough, and hadn’t done a thousand things. I thought this would be just the ticket – an elderly soprano with a bearded, hip quartet.’
And the eclectic nature of the songs reflects her own restless nature, as she puts it. Kate Bush, for example: ‘Her songs are often so complex, so beautifully layered harmonically. I do think she is semi-classical. An instinctive musician. She was wild and crazy in her young days, so they say, but she’s someone whose voice I really love.’
This leads to us talking about other artists from beyond the classical world with whom she’s worked. Elvis Costello is a favourite.
‘He has so much experience, and he uses his brain to be creative. He’s got an excellent memory, and therefore a whole bank of things he can tell you or use for his own musicmaking. He’s an extremely creative person. He never sits and thinks, this is nice, I’ll keep doing this for a year. He’s a restless person, just like me. If you have lunch, he’s always thinking, never standing still, and he’s a very exciting person.’
But her irritation with some promoters is obvious. ‘They’re reluctant to do anything new. They want a Schubert concert with a good accompanist. Well, that’s wonderful. But when we did concerts (with Brooklyn Rider) in Europe, sometimes in opera houses as part of a vocal series, my own audience – people who know me and have followed me, so to speak – have come, and enjoyed it.’
The curiosity of working with musicians from the world of rock or pop is that sometimes it is they who find themselves attracting criticism for mixing with classical artists – perish the thought! – rather than the other way round. ‘With Elvis, there was more criticism than there was of me. After all, when you’ve had a long career you do have the freedom that a younger singer might not have to try to do something new.
‘People are much less likely to suggest to me that I shouldn’t do it – “Do you really think this is right for you?” – that they would have been 25 years ago, when I think some of them might have said, “Stay away.”’
Talking about the songs on the disc, she enthuses about Nico Muhly, the young American composer whose opera Two Boys had its premiere at English National Opera back in 2011.
‘I started thinking – what else do I have in my cupboard that is new music? The Nico Muhly piece (the title track of the album) is really worthwhile. It’s got the rhythmic element that I like very much in a lot of contemporary music, and it’s a very strong ingredient. My brain likes that, and my heart does as well.
‘And you know when I ask myself why do I like this piece by Salonen or Adams, which is supposed to classical? It’s because it has similarities with good popular music – pop, rock, jazz – and a lot of pop musicians like Elvis or Sting listen to a great deal of classical music. Of course they do.
‘A musical intelligence is a musical intelligence. If your mind is tuned to the creativity of a musical idea, then that’s it. A good musician is always hungry to hear other things and learn more. A lot of us do listen across. Why not?’
Her reputation was first built, of course, on 19th-century repertoire, but in a recording career that stretches back more than three decades she has extended herself to encompass a good deal of 20th-century music. But she is conscious of wanting to work with more contemporary composers.
Perhaps this had been sharpened in the month or so before our interview by the experience of working with Thomas Adès in Vienna on his new opera The Exterminating
Angel which will have its UK premiere at the Royal Opera House on 24 April. Like the countertenor Iestyn Davies, interviewed here in the February issue of BBC Music Magazine, she found the experience exhilarating. ‘It is a great piece. There’s no doubt about that. And Tom is so enigmatically talented. It is a huge privilege to sing contemporary music of that quality.’
Perhaps because some of the rest of it is a trial. ‘A lot of contemporary music is starting to grow on me, although there is much that makes he angry, to be honest. Composers with minds that are too intellectual. If I’m learning it and I come up with phrases that don’t say anything, what am I supposed to do as a singer?
‘George Benjamin, for example, writes musical phrases that are fun to sing and to listen to. A lot of contemporary music is not fun to sing. The voice doesn’t enjoy it, and that’s not good. You need to have that emotion, otherwise you have to add emotion yourself. And that doesn’t work. But there’s so much music where the emotion is there, and that is better.’
So what does she listen to when she’s not working? ‘I don’t go that much to opera – it’s not my favourite way of spending an evening. Every now and then, and if the production is good, you can see opera that is the best thing you can imagine. If opera gets it right, it is a fantastic art form. I think it’s right that directors should always be trying new things, but sometimes they just do it for themselves.
‘And you have to accept, even with a fine production, that it won’t work every night. It’s the same with theatre, but on the night when it does it’s worth it. Nine out of ten times it might be OK, but it’s worthwhile for the one that you will always remember.’ It still works, as with Lulu, in which she says Berg has produced some of the most romantic music you would wish for, if only you allow your imagination to take over.
‘Do you know something? Many musicians don’t realise they need to use their imaginations because nobody ever told them. ‘Talking to young singers, trying to talk to them about how to look after the voice, you have to realise that out of ten there’s just the one maybe who’s got something. But there are too many who have no clue how to approach music. Most of them don’t even seem to know how to stand properly or breathe properly or to sing correctly. They just don’t have the technique. I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe it was always like that, but I don’t think so.
‘Compare them with pianists – they are so much more proficient. They’ve spent many more hours and know much more about harmony and rhythm. They know a lot of more than singers of the same age. So first of all, you have to know your ABC if you’re going to do anything. If they have a reasonable technique, pronunciation and style, then it’s about opening the mind to the possibility of being creative, and using your imagination and fantasy, and painting a picture, making a little show in your head.
‘You can do it all through the music. I use the music to colour everything. And then I look at the words. I’m being very honest here. Other people will read the words and let the text come to life. I have never been like that. ‘Sometimes with a song, I do think I know what it means. Then I come back to it five years later and say, oh that’s what it means.
But that’s just me.’
We talk about her own musical journey – such as her early love of Hugo Wolf, whose songs she believes were so helpful to her as a young singer; the emotional power helped her when she was, she says, shy and self-conscious. He was easier than even a simple Schubert song, and that perfect simplicity is something she accepts will always be difficult to achieve, even for her.
And it comes back, always, to the imagination: ‘All great artists are able to convey something to the audience that will let the audience discover something in their own imaginations. Technique is not enough. Loud or soft, fast or slow? That won’t do it.
‘Really to go into another place, and to take the audience with you, you need to get on the magic roundabout.’
Anne Sofie von Otter’s new recording with Brooklyn Rider, ‘So Many Things’, is out now on Naïve. And she plays the role of Leonora in Thomas Adès’s ‘The Exterminating Angel’ at the Royal Opera House (24 April – 8 May).
‘There is much contemporary music that makes me angry’