Anne Sofie von Otter

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ABBA, Angela Hewitt, Anne Sofie von Otter, Beethoven, Bengt Forsberg, Bonn, Boston, Bourrée fantasque, Brad Mehldau, Brahms, Canadian, Capriccio, Cécile Chaminade, Chabrier, Chansons de Bilitis, Chicago, Clairon, Debussy, Deutsche Grammophon, dog, Elvis Costello, Fauré, French, Götterdämmerung, German, Grammy Award, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Idylle, Im Abendrot, Julia Faulkner, Korngold, Kurt Weill, London, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Monteverdi, Mots d’Amour, Naïve, New York Philharmonic, opera, Péter Eötvös, piano, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Royal Opera House, San Francisco, Sarah Hucal, Schubert, soprano, Stockholm, Strauss, Swedish, The Guardian, The Threepenny Opera, Toronto, Trasimeno Music Festival, University of Chicago, Vienna, Von ewiger Liebe

Anne Sofie von Otter

“I have copious amounts of energy,” said Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter during a recent phone interview from her home in the Swedish countryside, “And I’m very thankful for that asset.” The answer comes in response to the question of how the celebrated singer continues to stay in demand, while maintaining a a seemingly tireless performance schedule as diverse as it is ambitious.

The first half of 2015 sees the intrepid Swede starring in a new production of Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at London’s Royal Opera House, appearances as Waltraud in Götterdämmerung in Vienna, and the premiere of a new work by Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös with the New York Philharmonic. And those are just a few of the highlights.

Yet von Otter is beginning 2015 with the kind of unique collaboration she enjoys, a five-city North American recital tour of German and French song with award-winning pianist Angela Hewitt. The tour kicks off at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory Friday night, 9 January 2015, and continues to Mandel Hall in Chicago Sunday afternoon, as part of the University of Chicago Presents series. Subsequent concerts will be given in intimate venues in Boston, New York City and San Francisco.

The tour is the product of a well-received concert given by the pair during Hewitt’s Trasimeno Music Festival in Umbria, Italy in 2012. “I like working with Angela. She’s very quick, and very musical, so I thought ‘Why not, let’s go for it,’” said von Otter of the decision to reunite for a multi-city tour. Hewitt agreed. “I’m so happy it has worked out,” said the Canadian pianist. “We don’t have a hard time feeling the music in the same way. It is all very natural and comes easily.”

“It’s not so usual to have two ladies on stage, one playing the piano and one singing,” added von Otter. This is particularly rare for the singer, who is usually seen in concert with keyboard collaborator Bengt Forsberg, with whom she has worked since 1980.

Hewitt is a worthy partner for the established mezzo. An acclaimed interpreter of Bach – The Guardian referred to her as “the pre-eminent Bach performer of our time” – her sizable discography reveals a penchant for both impressionistic French song and Romantic German repertoire, both of which appear on the concert program. Works to be performed include art songs selected by the singer, as well several solo piano pieces chosen by Hewitt. “A pure lieder recital is not my thing,” said von Otter. “I like to have the pianist or another instrumentalist join in and do solos.”

The first half of the concert will feature German repertory by Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert, including well-known Romantic lieder such as Schubert’s tender Im Abendrot, and Brahms’ Von ewiger Liebe. The second moves into Francophone territory, musical terrain that both von Otter and Hewitt are taken with. Pieces to be performed include works by Fauré, Debussy, Chabrier, and the infrequently heard female composer Cécile Chaminade.

Although von Otter is widely considered one of the top lieder interpreters of her generation, her calm speaking voice becomes animated as she discussed the final set of songs by Chaminade. “I can’t wait to do those!” she exclaimed. “They are so lovely and charming that I’m really having fun practicing them now.”

Chaminade’s late-Romantic period art song remained largely forgotten until von Otter and Bengt Forsberg recorded the album Mots d’Amour in 2002. Her songs will be placed after three pieces from Debussy’s steamy Chansons de Bilitis song cycle, and von Otter cites the complementary nature of both sets. “It is very nice to show the width between the very impressionistic Debussy and the Chaminade songs coming up at the end. They are very, very different, and yet both composers are wonderful.”

Hewitt, too, expressed enthusiasm for the lesser-known piano works she will present. “I have a particular fondness for the two works of Chabrier, Idylle and the Bourrée fantasque, which I played when I was a young student. They are not as well known as they should be, and are full of charm.”

In the days leading up to the New Year, a time when most of us direct our attention primarily to digesting oversized holiday meals, von Otter is focused on preparing herself for the tour and the remainder of the season. “I have a break now, so I’m working several hours every day to try to prepare the voice for what’s coming up,” she said. “There is a lot of diversity in my repertoire and what I need is time to prepare it really thoroughly so it’s all very well worked into my voice.”

This attitude is at the crux of the singer’s secret to success: hard work. “When I was very young I could switch from Korngold to Monteverdi from one day to the next.” Now, she says, practice becomes increasingly essential. “Singing is like any sport. You can’t just go and do the high jump or a marathon unless you really practice, and with age that becomes more and more important.”

This healthy dose of realism is likely what keeps von Otter perfecting songs and learning new roles at an age when many of her peers begin to show signs of vocal fatigue.

Another of von Otter’s admirable attributes is her willingness to strive for mindful improvement. “When I was in Chicago in the fall singing at the Lyric Opera [as Clairon in Strauss’s Capriccio], I took some lessons with Julia Faulkner who used to be a colleague of mine. I always liked Julia and found that she had a lot of students, young artists of the Lyric, who sang very well. She’s now at the very back of my mind, like ‘What would Julia tell me?’”

The daughter of a Swedish diplomat, von Otter spent her youth in Bonn, Stockholm and London. She studied voice in her native Stockholm and at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, before embarking on a fruitful three-decade career in leading opera houses and recital halls the world over. Tall and endowed with a natural grace, von Otter has sailed effortlessly into Hosenrolle and other mezzo faire, while maintaining a busy schedule of recital and soloist engagements, recording dozens of albums for Deutsche Grammophon, and more recently, her current label, Naïve.

Von Otter also has a penchant for collaborating with other artists and is not afraid to venture beyond the classical milieu. She has recorded an album of ABBA covers and collaborated with the likes of pop legend Elvis Costello and jazz pianist Brad Mehldau.

With ambitious plans for the 2015-16 season, including a production of The Threepenny Opera in Vienna, the energetic singer shows no signs of slowing down. “On the contrary, I may as well keep my nose to the grindstone,” she says cheerily. “Eventually I’ll have to stop and think about teaching, or doing master classes or perhaps getting a dog.”

Until that time comes, there are roles to be learned, recordings to be made and plenty of art songs to be sung.

Sarah Hucal – Chicago Classical Review

Getting in Tune

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Allen Wheat, Allison MacKay, application, Astronomia nova, astronomy, Bailey Hall, balcony, Banff Centre, bassline, Beethoven, Brahms, cantata, cello, chorale, Christian Mahler, comet, concerto, Copernicus, Cornell University, counterpoint, CounterPunch, David Yearsley, Dresden, Earth, English, Galileo, Galileo Project, gravity, guitar, Handel, harmony, Harmony of the Spheres, harpsichord, hockey, horse, improvisation, International Year of Astronomy, iPhone, Ithaca, Jan Dismas Zelenka, Jeanne Lamon, Jupiter, Kepler, L'Orfeo, Leipzig, Lowell Mason, Lucas Harris, Lully, lute, madrigal, mercury, modulation, Monteverdi, Newton, oboe, organ, overture, Ovid, Phaëton, planet, Plato, prelude, projector, Purcell, Rameau, score, Shaun Smyth, sinfonia, sky, solar system, space, St. Thomas Church, star, string bass, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Tarquinio Merula, Telemann, telescope, theatre, Toronto, tuning, vaulting, Venice, Venus, viol, Vivaldi, Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti

Galileo at his telescope

On being subjected to long stretches of tuning at some early music concerts I’m reminded of the old joke about going to a fight and having a hockey game break out. Even if the tuning doesn’t actually take longer than the musical works on the program, its repeated eruption throws things badly out of balance: before the music has even begun, the listener’s excited anticipation deflates. Between the pieces the flow of the concert is continuously diverted because of all those finicky viols with their profusion of strings, and even worse the lute in the unwieldy state to which it had evolved by the eighteenth century. One contemporary wag quipped that having such an instrument was more expensive than keeping a horse, and that if a lutenist lived to sixty years of age, forty of those had been spent tuning the beast.

In a modern symphony concert the tuning proceeds quickly and has a strictly policed ritual form that hearkens back to the militaristic origins of the orchestra as an institution. The second-in-command – the concertmaster – orders an A from the oboe and then directs the various platoons to fall in line with the pitch. The present-day orchestra has modernized musical weaponry that can be quickly calibrated: the mustering of the troops takes about a minute. This demonstration of uniform sonic discipline then quickly recedes into respectful silence for the entry of the generalissimo – the conductor – who leads his army into battle against the massed armies of one great power or another – Brahms, Beethoven, or some new contender.

Such discipline is often absent among the disorganized irregulars of many an early music battalion. Their dutiful fussings are necessary perhaps, but often dispiriting.

In the eighteenth century tuning was typically done to a prelude improvised by the organist or harpsichordist. He was charged with slowly traversing harmonies that made for useful references for the adjustments of the stringed instruments. The American musical traveler and collector Lowell Mason heard precisely this approach in the nineteenth century in Bach’s old church of St. Thomas in Leipzig. Mason reported that the result was the most out-of-tune band he’d ever heard.

Nowadays there are apps for iPhones and kindred gizmos that make off-stage tuning possible for strings and winds. But some recalcitrants cleave to their twentieth-century ways rather than go back to the eighteenth or join the twenty-first.

Imagine never having to listen to protracted tuning at a concert – neither before nor during. Such a concert would have two robust halves of music separated by an intermission that felt like it had been earned rather than just being more dead time to added to that already killed by the tuning.

And while we’re bent on focusing our concert on content, uplift, and edification, let’s dispense with the clutter of applause and move things along directly between the pieces with an enlivening script presented by a fabulous speaker/actor who brings the story of the concert to life as no set of stuffy program notes could ever do. And since we’re cleansing the stage of distraction, let’s sweep aside the scores and the music stands. Disappear the conductor, too.

Impossible, you say, to ask every one of the dozens members of an ensemble to memorize their own parts in a program that approaches two hours in duration. And to expect all these disparate minds to remain on track without traffic-cop direction given by a conductor will lead to too many collisions to count. How can all these folks remain on the same page when there is no page in the first place?

But banish these objections for a moment further and picture these unencumbered players interacting with one another musically and physically, sometimes moving about the stage in a kind of dance and assuming visually striking formations. The seated soldiers of music rise up to become ever-changing tableaux vivants.

What this revolutionary approach opens up is the possibility of a concert as theatre in which the grace and vibrancy of bodies at music become integral to the performance.

Such a vision of performed music, be it is classed as early or modern, is no mere pipedream. One of the world’s great baroque orchestras, the Toronto-based Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra has brought this ideal to eloquent and unforgettable reality with its “Galileo Project” conceived for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, marking four hundred years since Galileo Galilei made his first astronomical observations and Johannes Kepler published the Astronomia nova.

Developed by Tafelmusik during a residency at the Banff Centre, the Galileo Project was premiered there in January of 2009. Like a heavenly body migrating through the sky, the Galileo Project crossed Lake Ontario from Toronto to Ithaca, New York five years later to light up the Saturday night firmament in Cornell University’s Bailey Hall, a century-old neo-classical pile whose cavernous interior sometimes seems as if it could accommodate a couple of solar systems within its vaults. In spite of the far-from-ideal venue for the intimacies of early music, Tafelmusik filled the place up with the energy of its music and the appeal of the story it told with the aid of movement and image. The musicians traced their own orbits and cycles on stage beneath a large circular image projected behind them whose circumference was ornamented like Galileo’s telescope. It was as if we were looking through his lens at the extraordinary things from across the universe, from here on earth to the most distant stars; from Kepler’s printed words and music about the songs of the planets, to photographs of stunning terrestrial landscapes and fabulous nebulae and comets that we now can see at levels of resolution and magnification never dreamt of by Galileo himself. The well-researched and elegant script was written by the long-time Tafelmusik double bassist Allison MacKay, who has frequently collaborated on what she calls “cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary projects for the orchestra.”

Dressed all in black but with touches of color brightened by the colored hair of two of the female violinists, the players moved silently onto the stage to welcoming applause and started right in – no tuning! – with a Vivaldi concerto whose virtuosic allegro and seductive largo astonished and seduced, two things the night sky is also very good at doing. While this sensuous music of Venice introduced the Harmony of the Spheres in the context of the Galileo Project, it evokes for me the water and tenuous earth of its birthplace, Still, there is also something weightless and celestial in this eighteenth-century top-of the-charts stuff when done by Tafelmusik and its long-time director, Jeanne Lamon, recently retired but for the time-being still at her post.

From Vivaldi’s Venice we moved to France by way of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and comets and skyscapes seen through the Galilean lens to witness Phaeton’s disastrous crash of his father Apollo’s sun chariot. This suite of pieces came from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s 1683 Phaëton, the magnificent tragédie en musique about the ill-fated teenage joyrider. Tafelmusik literally moved from the overweening confidence of the pompous overture to the inexorably elegant and elegiac Chaconne in which twelve of the musicians themselves formed a circle and, like the signs of the zodiac, rotated through their choreographed yearly cycles. These motions allowed for the players to engage in seemingly spontaneous – but in fact carefully staged – dialogues of artistry and emotion in configurations at or near center stage that momentarily escaped the gravitational hold of the group.

From France we vaulted back a century to the musical world of Galileo, himself an amateur lutenist who came from a family of musicians. Galileo first demonstrated his telescope in 1609 in Venice, the same city that would later foster – and occasionally thwart – Vivaldi’s prolific genius. The transition was achieved effortlessly through the recitation of Galileo’s own writings by the narrator, actor Shaun Smyth. An Albertan born in Scotland, Smyth brought with him from the old country a mastery of dialects of the British Islands that he deployed occasionally – and only when called for – with humor, flare, and taste.

Smyth and the musicians traced the chronologically retrograde path from Vivaldi to Lully to Monteverdi Smyth by way of McKay’s insightful and well-researched script. Now with Galileo we heard the streaking comet of Monteverdi’s concerted madrigal Zefiro torna set by Tafelmusik for its two cellists, Christian Mahler and Allen Wheat, singing through their instruments like cosmic angels. Unleashed from the planets Plato imagined them sitting, they ran wild through earthly meadows and woodlands. A deft modulation lead to another treatment of same bassline by a fellow composer of Venetian stamp, Tarquinio Merula. We then retreated the shadows of a solo lute Toccata by Galileo’s younger brother, Michelangelo, the piece played with captivating melancholy and finesse by one of the orchestra’s most potent forces, lutenist/guitarist Lucas Harris. The plaintive voice of his instrument, designed to be heard in renaissance chambers, drew the hundreds-strong Bailey Hall audience into its inner feelings with a pull as strong and ineffable as gravity. It was a piece Galileo would have heard and indeed likely played himself, especially during the years of his long house arrest. These offerings were framed by pieces from the most famous work of Galileo’s time and place, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which premiered two years before the astronomer first pointed his telescope at the sky.

After a fact-checking peek at the night sky from the plaza in front of the concert hall, I returned from intermission to my seat just as the orchestra marched back on stage for a Purcellian prelude to a re-imagining of the festival of planets organized in Dresden for the Saxon-French royal wedding of 1719: with Rameau, Handel, Telemann and Zelenka we toured Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury.

After Smyth’s hilarious rendition of an eighteenth-century English drinking song that lauds and ridicules the paradigm-shifting discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, we heard J. S. Bach’s flights of fancy around Venus in the sinfonia to his cantata, How Brightly Shines the Morning Star (BWV 1). The chorale melody around which the other contrapuntal parts orbit resounded from one of the orchestra’s wonderful oboists placed in the hall’s distant balcony – yet another instance of the group’s creative use of the venue as a tool for mapping sound and space.

The evening closed with a rocketing rendition of another of Bach’s beloved cantata sinfonias, the opener to BWV 29. This piece had once been repurposed by Bach from a solo violin work to an organ concerto. It was again transformed by Tafelmusik into a violin concerto during which yet another of the group’s many star fiddle-players had a chance to shine, concluding a concert/performance that among its many marvels was an astounding feat of group memorization demonstrating the limitless reach of music in and as motion that, like the Keplerian cosmos, was never out of tune.

David Yearsley – CounterPunch

The True Art

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Academy of Ancient Music, Akademie für Alte Musik, Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Bach-Archiv Leipzig, Bachfest Leipzig, Capella Cracoviensis, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Christoph Spering, Christopher Hogwood, Dorothee Mields, Hamburg, Leipzig, Malcolm Bilson, Midori Seiler, Neue Bachgesellschaft, St. Thomas Boys Choir, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Telemann, Ton Koopman, Toronto, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

8 March 2014 marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Consequently, his work will be at the center of Bachfest Leipzig 2014 – set in the context of the work of his father, Johann Sebastian, and his godfather and predecessor in his post in Hamburg, Georg Philipp Telemann.

The most important textbook and treatise by C. P. E. Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Essay on the True Art of of Playing Keyboard Instruments), published in 1753, is the source of the theme for the festival.

Christopher Hogwood, Ton Koopman, Christoph Spering, Dorothee Mields, Midori Seiler, Malcolm Bilson to name just some – only the best musicians join with Leipzig’s Thomanerchor to investigate the “true art” of making music. We will be welcoming the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Toronto), our “orchestra-in-residence,” on their first visit to Leipzig, where they will play three concerts. With the Academy of Ancient Music, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, the Akademie für Alte Musik and Capella Cracoviensis, many of the most famous Baroque orchestras will be performing during the Bachfest.

General ticket sale begin 15 October 2013. Members of the Friends of the Leipzig Bach-Archive and the Neue Bachgesellschaft can already book beginning 1 October 2013.

– Bachfest Leipzig

Backup for the Rolling Stones

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a cappella, Bach Experience, Bethany Saul, Boston, Boston University, Cambridge, Cawthra Park Secondary School Chamber Choir, chorus, earbud, Green Valley High School Choir, headphones, John Paulsen, Las Vegas, Let It Bleed, London, London Bach Choir, Marsh Chapel Choir, Mick Jagger, Montréal, New York, Rolling Stone Magazine, Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood, San Francisco, Scott Jarrett, soprano, TD Garden, Toronto, You Can’t Always Get What You Want

When Scott Jarrett arrived at TD Garden for the Boston stop of the Rolling Stones 50 & Counting tour, he was able to declare, accurately and proudly, “I’m with the band.” Thanks to a serendipitous series of events and the close-knit nature of the choral community, Boston University’s Marsh Chapel Choir, directed by Jarrett, was accorded the rare privilege of accompanying the Stones on their iconic anthem You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Originally recorded with London’s Bach Choir for the 1969 album Let It Bleed, the song has become one of the band’s most recognized and is featured in the current tour of ten North American cities. At each stop, the band is teaming with a local choir to perform the song. The 2013 tour marks the first time the Stones have performed it with a live choir, and fans are forking over as much as $500 for tickets.

The campus-based choir, which includes professional singers as well as students, alumni, and Boston residents, goes on tour every year and has recently graced stages in San Francisco, New York, and Montreal. But to sing with the Stones in front of nearly nineteen thousand people is a gig beyond his wildest imagination, says Jarrett, who couldn’t wait to share the news with his 60-year-old father. The elder Jarrett was part of the Stones’ original fan base. “My dad was completely beside himself. He said, ‘You never cease to amaze me.’”

You Can’t Always Get What You Want, which begins with an a cappella choir section and is punctuated with high Cs, is not easy to sing. With just three weeks’ notice, Jarrett had to put together a group of twenty-four singers, heavy on sopranos, find a conductor to lead half the choir, and negotiate a contract. Students had already gone their separate ways for the summer, but Jarrett had no problem finding the two dozen singers. Those singers, in two groups of twelve, took their places on either side of the TD Garden stage. “I still haven’t completely processed it, to be honest,” says Bethany Saul. Saul, who is from Sheffield, England, says friends and family back home were shocked at the news. “It’s so outside the realm of anything I’ve ever done.”

For the Las Vegas stop, the Stones were joined by the Green Valley High School Choir, and in Toronto the performance featured the Cawthra Park Secondary School Chamber Choir. “I got an email from a woman from Cambridge, England, who’s been the person scouting for choirs for this tour,” says Jarrett. “She said our name came to her attention.” The choir will receive what Jarrett describes as a “nice check,” which will underwrite its visit to New York City for next year’s Bach Experience.

Jarrett and his singers aren’t exactly immersed in the music of the Stones, whose ages run from 65 (Ronnie Wood) to 69 (Mick Jagger). But when you consider their remarkable staying power, “who isn’t a Rolling Stones fan?” says Jarrett. “These guys have been playing this music for fifty years – that’s remarkable. It’s a miracle.” One younger student, he says, did ask whether the group “started that magazine.” But when he told choir members about the historic opportunity, the general reaction was, “You’re joking.”

One person who was mightily impressed was Jarrett’s close friend John Paulsen, who was Marsh Chapel assistant choral conductor a decade ago and met his wife in the choir. Jarrett, godfather to the Paulsens’ son, asked his friend to conduct with him on the TD Garden stage. “He’s completely thrilled; he knows the music backwards and forwards,” says Jarrett, describing Paulsen, in his early 40s, as “eighty percent classical musician” and twenty percent rock musician.

Jarrett, Paulsen, and the twenty-four singers arrived at TD Garden, met with the Rolling Stones musical director and rehearsed a bit, after which they did a run-through with the band. For the performance, the choir wore headpieces with earbuds, their first experience with live tracking technology. Jarrett thought it would be fun to don their usual choir robes, but “they wanted us in all black, young, hip, and sexy,” he says.

Perhaps the most triumphant moment, higher than those high Cs, was the choir’s introduction by the man himself, Sir Mick Jagger. “It’s kind of cool; they confirmed our names and the ensemble’s name so Mick could announce us on stage,” says Jarrett, who says he has great respect for Jagger. “He sounds great – it’s really inspiring. I hope that I’ll be waving my arms around making music when I’m that age.” For the students, he adds, the performances were a chance to “connect with a sound and a cultural force that shaped several generations and changed social dialogue.”

And they’ll have quite a story for their future grandchildren.

Susan Seligson – BU Today