Alice Sara Ott presents Nightfall, where she explores the transition and harmony between day and night, light and darkness. This recording showcases a collection of deeply emotional piano pieces by Satie, Debussy and Ravel.
On her new album Nightfall, set for release by the Yellow Label on 24 August 2018, 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 (1888-1890). 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.
Source: alicesaraott.com
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
♪ Rêverie (1890)
♪ Suite bergamasque (1890, rev. 1905)
i. Prélude. Moderato (tempo rubato)
ii. Menuet. Andantino
iii. Clair de lune. Andante très expressif
iv. Passepied. Allegretto ma non troppo
Erik Satie (1866-1925)
♪ Gnossienne No.1 (1889-1890)
♪ Gymnopédie No.1 (1888)
♪ Gnossienne No.3 (1889-1890)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
♪ Gaspard de la nuit, M.55 (1908)
i. Ondine
ii. Le Gibet
iii. Scarbo
♪ Pavane pour une infante défunte, M.19 (1899/1910)
Alice Sara Ott, piano
Recording: Berlin, Meistersaal, March 2018
Deutsche Grammophon 2018
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Nightfall. It's that magical hour when day and night face each other and the sky descends into twilight. For a brief moment, light and darkness are in harmony and merge together.
I believe that we humans all carry certain elements of light and darkness within us. An awareness and affirmation of life, reality and conscience on the one hand, the shadow of greed and temptation on the other. The demand for things we can't have. And we don't always succeed in recognising or even defining the boundary between them.
This album is devoted to the music of three composers who lived, worked and died in Paris. Three contemporaries, sometimes friends, sometimes rivals. Though they could hardly have been more different, they were all part of an era and a movement that stood the world of art on its head and gave it a new definition and significance.
Claude Debussy composed Rêverie in 1890 while still in a phase of musical searching and development. Rêverie, with its repeated motifs and its lack of climaxes, has a somnolent, trance-like character that connects it with the world of Satie. It's also a marvellous, almost innocent way to begin this album.
Suite bergamasque arose in the same year. But Debussy reworked it over and over again before releasing it for publication in 1905. Inspired by baroque dance rhythms, the outer movements Prélude and Passepied, as well as Menuet, have a merry, sometimes festive character that poses a great contrast to Clair de lune.
Here Debussy set a like-named poem by Paul Verlaine in which the poet speaks of the happiness that masks his sorrow. This human dichotomy finds vivid expression in Debussy's setting.
Erik Satie's Gymnopédies (1888) and Gnossiennes (1890) are among the most popular works in the history of classical music. Satie was convinced that a composer has no right to claim his listeners' time. He developed his own notion of background music, which he called musique d'ameublement – "furniture music". Despite his minimalist style of composition, Satie was an extremely complex and cynical man. This is plain to see in his instructions to the player: instead of expression marks we find such turns of phrase as "Open your head", "Bury the sound" or "Create something hollow". The ambiguity of these phrases not only makes me rack my brain (they remind me of the lyrics of my favourite band, Pink Floyd), but sometimes cause me to doubt Satie's humble artistic persona.
Maurice Ravel, with his three-part Gaspard de la nuit of 1908, composed one of the greatest challenges in the piano repertoire. Goaded by the ambition to surpass Mily Balakirev's Islamey, then regarded as the most difficult piano piece ever written, he set three poems from Gaspard de la nuit, a volume of prose-poems by Aloysius Bertrand. By his own account, Bertrand received this volume from the Devil himself, who, disguised as an old man, met him in a park in Dijon. Ravel's setting is demanding in the extreme, both pianistically and emotionally. In Ondine, named for the water sprite who falls unhappily in love with a human being, we are confronted with our own fears of rejection and heartbreak. In Le Gibet, where the dead man's heartbeat echoes through the entire piece, we face the fear of loss and transience. And Scarbo, a gnome who attacks artists in the night and drinks their blood, confronts us with fear of failure. While Ravel was working on this piece his father suffered a stroke, and the act of creation was overshadowed by the ever-present dread of receiving news of his death. One month after completing his pianistic triptych, Ravel's father died of cerebral thrombosis.
At the end of the album is Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte, a little piece composed in 1899. I found it a fitting way to end this very complex and bleak album. Ravel himself described the piece as "an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court". Whether this expresses a desire for eternal youth, or the dilemma of someone who cannot grow up, is a question I leave to the listener's imagination.
To me, this album is one of the most personal and challenging recordings I have ever made. This year marks the beginning of a new decade in my life, and my tenth year with Deutsche Grammophon. I wanted to assemble a programme that reflects my personal memories and experiences of the last ten years.
One month before I entered the recording studio – I was in the midst of the bleak world of Gaspard de la nuit – my father suffered a heart attack that he barely survived. Despite the fortunate outcome, these were terrifying hours and days in which I realised how close life and death are intertwined. But there can be no light without darkness, and no hope without fear. And sometimes the borders blur. As in Nightfall.
I dedicate this album to my family and all those who have accompanied and supported me in the 30 years of my life's brief journey.
Source: Alice Sara Ott (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson) (CD Booklet)
The merger of light and darkness purports to govern the programme choices for Alice Sara Ott's latest release, although her interpretations fall more into the shades of grey category. A dark and rather somnolent aura prevails in Debussy's Rêverie, in comparison to the 94-year-young Menahem Pressler's shapelier traversal released a few months ago on the same label (5/2018). By contrast, Ott's straightforward, line-orientated Suite bergamasque differs from the muted hues and subjectivity characterising label-mate Seong-Jin Cho's recent version (1/2018). Compare her relatively grounded "Menuet" movement to Cho's lighter, more capricious reading and you'll hear for yourself.
On the other hand, she underplays and tiptoes around "Clair de lune", unlike Jean-Yves Thibaudet's beautifully sung-out rendition (Decca, 7/2000). Her "Passepied" sounds relatively matter-of-fact and neutral when measured alongside Cho (again) and a faster, more interestingly inflected Alexis Weissenberg performance that's also on DG (7/1986). Ott's slow and rhetorical Satie Gnossienne No.1 sounds unctuous and self-aware next to Alexandre Tharaud's faster, more direct and comfortably idiomatic recording (Harmonia Mundi), although she treats the popular first Gymnopédie and the third Gnossienne simply and beautifully.
On to Ravel's increasingly ubiquitous Gaspard de la nuit. For all of Ott's attractive shadings and half tints in "Ondine", other pianists bring more consistent clarity to the main chordal ostinato pattern (Aimard, Berezovsky and, of course, Michelangeli). She stretches "Le gibet" out to a possibly record-breaking 9'20", as opposed to the normal five-to seven-minute range of motion. Amazingly enough, however, Ott's carefully calibrated nuances and balances and hypnotic sense of long line prove gripping on their own terms. The repeated notes in the introduction to "Scarbo" sound less foreboding and mysterious than mechanically hammered out, while the dotted rhythms are accurately executed yet lack the lightness, spring and propulsion one hears in the classic reference recordings of Pogorelich (DG, 6/1983) and François (EMI/Warner). An elegant, intimately scaled Ravel Pavane closes a recital that largely goes in one ear and out the other, save for Ott's extraordinary, not-to-be-missed slow-motion "Le gibet".
Source: Jed Distler (gramophone.co.uk)
With her talent not limited to a global career as a high level performing artist, Alice Sara Ott also expresses her diverse creativity through a number of design and brand partnerships beyond the borders of classical music. She was personally requested to design a signature line of high-end leather bags for JOST, one of Germany's premium brands. Alice has also been global brand ambassador for Technics, the hi-fi audio brand of Panasonic Corporation, and she has an ongoing collaboration with the French luxury jewellery house, Chaumet.
A prominent figure on the international classical music scene, Alice Sara Ott regularly performs with the world's leading conductors and orchestras. In 2018-2019 as well as the international Nightfall recital tour, Alice will perform with NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo (Gianandrea Noseda), Philharmonia Orchestra (Santtu-Matias Rouvali), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic (Edward Gardner), London Symphony Orchestra (Elim Chan), St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra (Yuri Temirkanov), and for a European tour with Gothenburg Symphony (Santtu-Matias Rouvali). She continues her collaboration with London Symphony Orchestra via her chamber music residency at LSO St Luke's, where she will give several Alice and Friends concerts with fellow artists including Ray Chen, Pablo Ferrández, Nemanja Radulovic, Alexey Stadler, Dimitri Ashkenazy and Francesco Tristano.
Alice Sara Ott has worked with conductors at the highest level including Lorin Maazel, Gustavo Dudamel, Pablo Heras-Casado, Paavo Järvi, Neeme Järvi, Sir Antonio Pappano, Gianandrea Noseda, Andres Orozco-Estrada, Yuri Temirkanov, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sakari Oramo, Osmo Vänskä, Vasily Petrenko, Myung-Whun Chung, Hannu Lintu and Robin Ticciati. She continues to perform with ensembles such as Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Wiener Symphoniker and Dresdner Philharmonie.
Source: alicesaraott.com
Photos by Ester Haase
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See also
Alice Sara Ott – All the posts
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