Music that Changed Me

Pianist Alice Sara Ott

Pianist Alice Sara Ott was born in Munich to a German father and Japanese mother. Her performances on the world’s great stages of solo and concerto repertoire have been met with acclaim, and she is rapidly carving out a reputation for imaginative, insightful programmes. Ott’s Deutsche Grammophon album Nightfall, featuring music by Debussy, Satie and Ravel, marks ten years since her signing to the Yellow Label, and is out now.

My parents took me to a concert when I was three that made me want to become a pianist. My mother was a pianist herself and wasn’t very fond of the idea, so I had to beg her for about a year. When I turned four my parents gave in and I started lessons with a ★ungarian piano teacher. ★e wasn’t a fan of traditional piano methods, so I didn’t start with Czerny or ★anon but with the

JS BACH Inventions. I spent the first two or three years playing only Bach. Bach was my first love – I was obsessed with jigsaw puzzles at the time and, for me, playing Bach Inventions was like assembling a puzzle: you have different voices and changing motifs which you have to put together to make up the whole piece. I listened to a lot of Bach, too, and found that the most mind-blowing recording was by Glenn Gould. People say Bach is their bible and I can understand that. There is something pure yet complicated about his music – whenever I feel down, I listen to Bach and it calms me.

My parents met in Japan. After they moved to Germany, my mother started taking singing classes and listened to Lieder at home; I grew up listening to SCHUBERT. Since I was German, I could understand the words, and I loved the stories. We listened a lot to the baritone ★ermann Prey performing Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang, and I loved the way he created this other, magical world. I could see the creatures, people or landscapes and by listening to the songs I could escape into a daydream. And although I was only five or six, I was fascinated by their dark sides. Lieder accompaniment is something I really want to do – singing is the most natural way of making music and all pianists should do it at some point in their lives.

My mother also listened to opera and there was a time when I was obsessed with MOZART’S The Magic Flute and especially the Queen of the Night aria. My mother’s favourite recording was by the German soprano Edda Moser – what fascinated me about her performance was that she reached the high F without any effort. And so I’ve always thought that, no matter how difficult the piece is, it’s essential that you should never let the audience sense your struggle; effortlessness is very important in music.

My teenage years were ruled by PINK FLOYD. I loved their music, particularly when Syd Barrett was still in the band. But my favourite of all was the song ‘★ey You’ from The Wall, one of their rare ballads. I used to get obsessed with analysing their lyrics which were a bit like Erik Satie’s comments; when you look at Satie’s music, he doesn’t write any dynamics in the score and the structure is simple, but he writes really weird comments like ‘open your head’ or ‘form something hollow’ that remind me of Pink Floyd’s lyrics. I spent a lot of time thinking about them, getting more and more confused.

I spent seven years in Berlin before recently moving to Munich and the last two or three were very precious. When I moved to the Mitte district, I had two close non-musician friends who lived in my street and we used to go to a bar nearby. It was a tradition to go there after arriving from some tour or other, and I knew all the bartenders and regular guests. I remember we would sit there and talk about life, play chess, drink whisky and listen to NINA SIMONE. It was like coming home and it’s something I really miss about Berlin. Nina Simone had a wonderful voice – I found out later that she studied classical piano at the Juilliard and only started singing because when she applied for a job as a pianist at a bar, she was told that she could only get it if she could also sing.

Interview by Oliver Condy