Category Archives: Talking heads

Alice Sara Ott – The Chopin Project

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Alice Sara Ott

German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott has recorded Chopin before – but not like this. Signed to Deutsche Grammophon, she has recorded the composer’s complete Waltzes for piano – along with discs of Beethoven, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Musorgsky. Now she returns to Chopin, but with the Broadchurch composer Ólafur Arnalds for company. The Chopin Project is their collaborative album, featuring recordings made by Ott on a less-than-perfect piano, complemented by pieces for strings from Arnalds.

Ott is enthusiastic about the project as we grab a quick phone call in-between her rehearsal schedule – which has just reached the Barbican, where she has selected a piano for a concert. So, as Arcana begins with every interviewee…

Can you remember your first encounter with classical music?

My mother is a professional pianist, so there is always music in our house. That means the first classical music I heard was probably when I was still in her belly! I think my first concert experience was when three years old, and I had to go with my mum as she couldn’t find a babysitters.

At that age, you’re not able to communicate with adults, but every child still wants to be understood. Everybody wants to find a way of expressing themselves other than with the voice, and I was fascinated by the idea of about 200 people listening to someone in a room, playing piano, without talking.

I think I started playing piano as a simple wish for being understood and getting some attention. It goes beyond spoken communication. The music was not necessarily what moved me, it was the situation, and the language everybody listened to and understood.

Can you remember your first encounter with the music of Chopin?

It was around five years old. I had a cassette tape – I think Deutsche Grammophon had a series for children where they got an actor to tell the story of the composer with different recordings. I think it was a birthday or Christmas present, and that was the first time I experienced it. I couldn’t pronounce it!

Where did you meet Ólafur?

I had never really listened to his music before, but I met him through a producer who used to be my producer at DG. When Ólafur started to talk about the idea he came across the Chopin Waltzes disc I had done, and he contacted me through the producer. In the beginning I couldn’t imagine the idea. I’m very careful with these collaborations, as I see myself as a core classical artist.

 

What did you think of his music?

When I listened to Ólafur’s music it had taste and style, and I really liked it, so we spoke on Skype and I ended up accepting the offer. I play the Chopin pieces as written, but it was good to get a little bit away from the perfect, stereotypical sound we get in recording these days. Everything is so clean and perfect, but in those days before recording it was not so important and everybody was closer to the artist. You don’t hear the pedals or the hammers in piano recordings any more, you just hear when the sound reaches the acoustic.

Nowadays we have great instruments, and great halls, but with The Chopin Project we wanted to bring people back to really listen and get an intimate experience. It was an all-acoustic thing, and it was great for me. We are planning on a tour with the project. It’s so much fun!

How much input did you have into Ólafur’s compositions?

Almost nothing at all, he wrote them separately. The one track where I’m playing is where I play little ornaments, but this is his part of the album – me joining his project, his idea.

I like the idea he didn’t do rearrangements and came up with original pieces, and I think the pieces with strings complement the ones with solo piano. He felt it was more appropriate for strings and the one track where he uses the solo violin.

You said how important the more natural approach to recording was – do you think modern recording can be too clinical sometimes?

It’s a very different sound experience, the concept is different. We tried to distance ourselves from how recordings are made today.

It’s a great thing the technology is so advanced and everything is possible, but sometimes I wish for more live moments, and I like to record something with a natural flow. You will never get the same as experiencing the music live, but it is a lot closer to that.

Will The Chopin Project bring his music to a new audience?

I hope so, and I want it to bring in not just a new audience but the audience that have heard him one thousand times. I think it sits very well with the times we live in. Things are so perfect in those human moments, experiencing live music – these moments are very precious. The old audience gets a new perspective, and at some points in the recording I can even hear myself breathing. It makes it very human.

You have worked and recorded with Francesco Tristano, who also crosses between classical and other forms of music such as techno. How did your collaboration begin?

With Francesco it started out of friendship; and a passion we share for the music of Bach. I grew up with him aside from our passion for food.

I had the idea to invite him on as a guest for a French Baroque album, and then for a Bach double album that didn’t work out. We decided to base a two-piano album around The Rite of Spring (given the title Scandale) and came across the music for the Ballets Russes company. These are some of the major pieces in classical music, so we chose Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) and found a couple that went with it. We have now played 30 concerts together, and we’re at a point where we don’t think about most of the music on the disc originally being written for orchestra.

For me you enter a new world. We never can play without energy, and that’s the fun part. It’s very physical and we wouldn’t do it after an espresso or something! It’s all about dance music. It’s rhythmically very challenging but so fun. When we play it you see the audience react physically, moving their shoulders, and that’s so nice to see, that’s what music does and that’s the common language that goes beyond words, and makes you feel very privileged.

What are your future plans?

I’m in London now for my performance of the Liszt Piano Concerto no.2, and then I move on to Shanghai, South America, the United States and then a couple more times to London. Francesco and I will come to London with Scandale.

The Chopin Project is out now on Mercury Classics. You can find out more about Alice and her recordings by visiting her website

John Tejada

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John Tejada is a well established and highly respected techno musician – but his roots lie in an upbringing full of classical music. Arcana called him on a break from work in his California studio, where he wrote his tenth album Signs Under Test, released on Kompakt this month.

He spoke about the benefits of a musically open family, how that led him to hone his own approach to music, and why he loves the music of Steve Reich. But first, after a quick listen…

Can you remember your first encounter with classical music?

My first memories were from my parents, with my mother being an opera singer and my father a clarinettist and conductor. I would often get dragged around to gigs! One of my first memories was seeing them practice, and that made it very real. I think that probably that programmed me into the routine of how you get up, have breakfast and then practice, and that has stuck with me right through to this day. It was a big influence in what I do now.

There are often moments in your music where you are subtly very inventive, using unusual rhythms and less conventional harmonic patterns. Does that stem from your upbringing do you think?

I suppose it does, but I couldn’t properly explain it. It’s one of the different ways I got to where I am now. My focus is not on getting played out by DJs but it is an enjoyment of listening to what feels interesting. Getting the fuzzy feeling, that’s what I’m after!

What does classical music mean to you?

I wouldn’t say that ‘classical’ music means a great deal to me, as I tend towards the stuff that the more modern composers did, I would go with my mum to see Steve Reich concerts; we’d go to see that stuff together. I don’t actively listen to the classic stuff, but because opera was always on at full blast in the house I got to hear a lot of it. It gave me an interesting perspective on what music is and what it can do. It has stuck with me the whole way through.

The categorisation of what is classical music has always puzzled me. The early works of Stockhausen are classical but today sound like something like that could be released on Torch Records! Looking back, it’s pretty wild what was going on in the 1950s and 1960s compared to what people do today.

Is Steve Reich a big influence on your work?

Absolutely. One of the biggest goose bumps I have ever had was going to see the Music for 18 Musicians live for the first time:

You start to see that live, and you say “Holy shit, it’s real!” It flared up a real love of the music in me. No-one bothered to notice that on my last album The Predicting Machine there is a strong nod to Reich on the fourth track, Winter Skies:

Reich was so revolutionary in the way he showed people could have ideas of just using tape loops. He was a massive influence on digital music today with the loops and the phase experiments – he laid the fundamentals to what people are still doing now. I would love to see Music for 18 Musicians performed on synths, I think that would be really successful.

What would you say classical music – as you listen to it – and techno have in common?

I think a lot of stuff! I really enjoy making those connections. I think classical music – and the music of Reich – refers to looped and non-looped music that is beatless. The question for techno is ‘Can you do that with a beat?’ For me though the fundamentals of techno and drone are laid down without a beat. Terry Riley and Steve Reich discovered that. It is an interesting connection there, but I find a lot of people won’t give it a chance. It’s like eating a vegetable. There are times when I won’t explore because I just don’t know.

What do you know and like at the moment?

I am a big fan of Terry Riley, because he is one of those great composers who cross into other areas. In his album A Rainbow in Curved Air he used music in a way that would give Autechre a run for their money:

I also think early Art of Noise records are really interesting, you have people trying stuff out – because why not? I remember when I was listening to some of this stuff at home, and being nearly asleep but being scared silly at the same time! We had some really interesting radio in the mid-1980s, and I was absorbing some crazy stuff.

I remember one time when one of my friends came round who was writing some particularly experimental stuff. He was playing that new stuff for me, which was a real risk for him playing it at full blast. Mum came in and said, “What are you playing, it’s really interesting – it sounds like…” and then she named three different composers. It wasn’t the standard request to turn it down at all!

Would you like to try writing more classically based music?

I have done some more experimental things on labels like Plug Research, but yes – I do have an idea to do something that is modern classical. We’ll see how that develops!

John Tejada’s new album Signs Under Test is out now on Kompakt – and you can listen to it on the label’s website here. For more about the artist himself, visit his Facebook page

Emika

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Up until now, singer-songwriter Emika has been best known for her one-woman electronica, best witnessed on her Emika and DVA albums for Ninja Tune. Yet she has always carried a torch for classical music, and recently released Klavirni, an album of piano miniatures, on her own Emika Records label. She is therefore the ideal artist to kick off Arcana’s interview section! She does so by talking about her watershed encounters with classical music, and the ambitious plans she has as a composer and label owner.

Can you remember your first encounter with classical music?
It was actually the first moment I cried from listening to music. I was 12 and even though I was on my own I felt very embarrassed. I was forced to stay with my parent’s friends during our family holiday and I was being mega grumpy and did not want to join in doing any ‘nice’ things such as going on a long walk, so I decided to stay at the house on my own. I went through all their CDs and found Chopin piano nocturnes. The piece was Chopin’s Nocturne in E-Flat Major, Op.9 No. 2:

Your ‘Klavirni’ album is inspired by Janácek and Bartók – were there any piano pieces in particular that inspired you when writing the album?
I’m very impressed by Erik Satie‘s work, it is so touching and so precise. I think playing lots of notes is quite achievable on the piano as it’s always based on scales and anyone can learn to move their fingers in a spider-like pattern. But having the confidence to leave space in between phrases, to not play every possible note, to not feel the need to show-off. That is also skill in my opinion and I think Satie and Janáček were not only great piano players but they were also fantastic composers and therefore didn’t need to be ‘virtuosic’. I love piano pieces with a sense of space inside them.

Is some of your work improvisatory? The recordings have a very natural flow to them, as if you recorded them in one take.
They are all one-take improvs. Sometimes if my cat jumped on my chair or my mum got a phone call, I cut out these kinds of unwanted sounds. But there are lots of moments when it started to rain outside (in England of course it rains a lot) and you can feel this pressure change in some of the recordings. That stuff is pretty cool and ‘real’. I like to explore ‘real’ space within recordings and not only work with synthesis.

Was it important to keep some electronic elements from the work you’ve done before, such as the sampling, re-sampling and other processes you have used on the album?
Yes for sure. I have an itch to scratch! It’s fun to pull sounds apart and also get to know the music on a sonic level.

Although you have used these processes, you have made sure the music keeps its simplicity. Do you think sometimes classical music overcomplicates itself?
Yes. Too much diddle-di-di. I don’t like most classical music to be honest, just a few composers / conductors / performers and specific pieces from each.

Do you think moving between electronic club music and classical music means it becomes more accessible to the listener…and do you plan to keep writing in both styles?
I don’t like the stiff wall between these worlds. There’s no need to be just one way or the other and I plan do what I do until there is no difference between them in relation to my work. It’s all music.

What further classical music do you have planned…and might it involve you singing?
I’m going to record my first really big orchestral piece this year in Prague which features the beautiful Czech soprano Michaela Srumova and around 70 players. The music is rooted in grief, and features a miracle which pushes you over the edge and then you fall into a great unknown. It’s so full of life, things which I cannot express through words or any other way. Some things really are best expressed purely as musical forms.

What does classical music mean to you?
Life itself.

If you could recommend one piece of classical music to Arcana readers, what would it be and why?
Barber‘s Adagio for Strings. It doesn’t get more sincere then this.

Emika‘s new album Klavirni is available to buy now, either digitally, on CD or on vinyl. The vinyl has intonation included, while the CD has an option to email Emika Records direct to have the notation sent.

Emika has completed a DJBroadcast podcast in the form of an ambient mix, which can be heard here – while Dilo, one of the recordings from the album, can be downloaded for free here