Anne Sofie von Otter
THESE LANDS ARE HER LANDS
From Opera to Folksongs, Mezzo-Soprano Anne Sofie von Otter Leaves No Boundary Uncrossed
By this stage in her career, it would almost be easier to make a short list of the music that Anne Sofie von Otter hasn't sung than to sum up her many triumphs. With great successes in the operas of Handel, Mozart, and Strauss in particular, a deep exploration of the romantic and early 20th-century song repertoire, and a special love for Scandinavian music, the Swedish mezzo-soprano continues to branch out. She released a uniquely endearing holiday album in 1999, Home for Christmas, and two of her projects from that year won Grammy awards: Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn and her brilliant comic turn in Stravinsky's Rake's Progress. Now, while preparing to take the title role of Carmen on stage for the first time -- and plotting further crossovers alongside Elvis Costello -- she offers a wide-ranging album of Folksongs, spanning the nations and languages of Europe from Hungary to England. The versatile and gracious singer caught up with Barnes & Noble.com's classical editor, Scott Paulin, in a recent phone conversation from Stockholm.
Barnes & Noble.com: This is your first recording devoted entirely to folk-inspired songs, but you've recorded a lot of music that could fall into that category -- Grieg's Haugtussa, and some of Mahler's works, to name a few. What is it about this genre that keeps drawing you back?
Anne Sofie von Otter: A lot of it is very real, fresh, pure music, and often the texts speak to me as well. For me to explain why I like certain music more than others is always difficult, but certainly there's a huge appeal in a lot of this folk music, both for me and the pianist, Bengt Forsberg.
B&N.com: You perform in six different languages on this album alone. Aside from Swedish, what are your favorite languages to sing in?
ASvO: French must be my second favorite. The French language is very beautiful, and somehow it seems to lie quite well for me -- and I understand it quite well, which is nice. For me it's much easier to sing in French than it is to sing in Italian, which most people would disagree with, because they think Italian is such a wonderful language to sing in. Unfortunately, I avoid Russian because I don't read the [Cyrillic] alphabet. But there's a huge treasure trove of Russian songs. I would love to have a look at Prokofiev and Medtner, and all the rest of them, but I never seem to get there because of the language barrier.
B&N.com: Something that often comes across on your recordings -- especially in Scandinavian repertoire -- is the innate music of the language itself, the richness of the consonant and vowel sounds. Is that something you make a special effort to emphasize?
ASvO: Yes, I'm very keen about languages. I love working really hard to get the pronunciation right; it gives me a lot of pleasure and satisfaction to work on that particular detail. I'll go to people who speak the language for help. It's a sense of style -- the language has as much to do with the style as the actual music does.
B&N.com: Reading the lyrics on your new album, there are what we'd call some very "politically incorrect" sentiments in the folk texts: for example, women asking their husbands to come and beat them! Did you have any qualms about that?
ASvO: In the Kodály songs, yes! I must say, I raised an eyebrow initially, but it was all part of the fun, I suppose! And the woman doesn't sound particularly worried by it. Maybe she beats him back!
B&N.com: What recording projects are you most proud of?
ASvO: Generally the one I'm sort of involved in at the moment; we're preparing for a recording of music by Cécile Chaminade, a female French composer. She wrote a great many songs, and they are all absolutely delightful. Otherwise, the ones I enjoyed the most would have been [Handel's] Ariodante, and the Kurt Weill recording with John Eliot Gardiner. On those two, I was on cloud nine for the whole recording period, because the music was so wonderful and everyone was in a good mood. The lieder recordings that I've done with Bengt are always very, very hard work, even though I get a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of them. I'm always afraid my voice won't last until the last song is recorded. It puts such a strain on the voice to record 70 minutes of music, and I do a lot of retakes. I'm very particular, I have a very clear idea of what I want, and I keep on going until I get it. And we often start fighting! Bengt and I are each other's best friends, I would say. We know each other inside out, and therefore you not only laugh and giggle and have a good time working, but you also fight quite a lot.
B&N.com: What singers have been particular inspirations for you?
ASvO: There was one production of Carmen that Agnes Baltsa sang, and she -- at least in those days -- was a fantastic singer, because she has such courage and she's got a sort of daredevil inside her. She's very musical, and I like the quality of her voice, and she just does what she thinks she has to do in a given moment. It was very sexy and very exciting, and very dangerous. The other mezzo I've looked up to is Christa Ludwig. And since then, Cecilia Bartoli, who has fantastic musicianship and also a huge personality, which is always exciting. That to me is very important: musicality and personality. Then, whether the voice is very pretty or beautiful or lovely isn't so interesting to me. It's much more that it has something to say. And all three of those ladies do.
B&N.com: How did your collaboration with Elvis Costello come about, and what can we expect from it?
ASvO: He loves classical music; he goes to a lot of concerts, and he came to Covent Garden and to Wigmore Hall to see me do different things. We are recording in October, and for the last three years we've been communicating: sending tapes to each other and letters about why he thinks a particular song would suit me, and I write back and tell him why I don't like it or why I do. It's been a ball game, and finally we're getting close to recording. We had a trial session in February, where we recorded about eight or ten songs, just to see how it worked -- and how I would work when I sang with this very different style, with a close microphone. I think it's very good that it's taken its time, and what we're going to record is still not absolutely final. There'll be a couple of his songs, old songs and newly written ones, and there'll be maybe the odd Lennon-McCartney or some Beach Boys.
Singing this music isn't so difficult, but to actually make it mean something is difficult. And I think that's what happens most of the time when classical singers do crossover. They just stand there and sing something with a nice-sounding croon, and it's totally uninteresting and dull. You have to make it work for you, so that your character and your personality still come through.
B&N.com: Who are some of your other favorite performers outside of classical music?
ASvO: There were times when I thought Prince was wonderful. Some of his older stuff is still really, really good. I find he's a fantastic performer and a musician, and the way he uses his voice and the instruments is spectacular. Jeff Buckley -- Elvis Costello introduced me to his records -- he was fantastic, a little bit related to Prince in the way he uses his voice. Nina Simone was also quite a recent discovery -- I've always known who she is, but I fell in love with one of her recordings a while ago.
B&N.com: As we enter the 21st century, where do you see opera and classical music going?
ASvO: As performers, we have to broaden what we sing and how we sing it. We can't just do what we did 50 years ago anymore. It's not interesting enough, I don't think. I've come to that conclusion in the last years, and I now include more modern stuff in my recitals -- mildly crossover stuff. Recently on tour, we did [Michel Legrand's] "Once Upon a Summertime," and we did another song by Benny Andersson from ABBA, who's written a musical. Classical music can be very stuffy -- and I don't mean that it's boring -- but I certainly feel that you have to wake up to the fact that we are very far away now from the 19th century, when most of this music was composed. There's so much happening now in the media -- everything is loud, and everything is bright and colorful, and we just have to go along in some kind of way to make it interesting.
July 18, 2000
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