‘No Michelangeli? Are you sure?’ I confirm that yes there is no Michelangeli. ‘Who then?’ she asks. I tell her: Glenn Gould, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with Gerald Moore, Georges Cziffra, Daniil Shafran and Alfred Cortot. I’ve been looking back at the last time I interviewed Alice Sara Ott, 12 years ago for our (now) sister magazine International Piano, when she told me which five recordings meant the most to her. ‘Well,’ she admits, ‘these are good choices, but I’m surprised I didn’t include Michelangeli.’

Ott is speaking to me from her flat in Berlin. Gramophone readers may recall her bursting on to the scene back in 2008 when she signed to Deutsche Grammophon. Her first album of Liszt’s Transcendental Studies (recorded 2008) garnered rave reviews. I welcomed it with reservations (3/10), and thought it a significant achievement, not least because very few female pianists had recorded the whole set of 12. This was swiftly followed by Chopin’s complete waltzes; her debut orchestral recording on the Yellow Label of the first piano concertos of Tchaikovsky and Liszt; and a 2010 recording of solo Beethoven. DG claims that to date, she has ‘album streams of over 500 million’.

Ott’s attention to detail runs from writing the booklet notes to listening to all 769 takes over 14 days (photo: Hannes Caspar)

The first of a series of themed albums of mixed repertoire, ‘Scandale’, was recorded in 2013, followed by ‘Project’, ‘Wonderland’, ‘Nightfall’ and, in 2021, ‘Echoes of Life’. This last mixed Chopin preludes with works by Ligeti, Rota, Takemitsu, Chilly Gonzales and Arvo Pärt, and specially composed pieces by Francesco Tristano and Ott herself. Patrick Rucker’s review (10/21) told us that the album was ‘the audio component of an interdisciplinary project that includes virtual architecture by Hakan Demirel, visual elements by Ahmet Do˘gu ˙Ipek, fashions by Sonia Trinkl’: quintessential Ott. More significantly, so far as this article is concerned, the later deluxe edition of the album includes additional works, including two short ones by John Field – which brings us to the main reason for this interview.

Ott’s latest release is of the ‘complete’ nocturnes by the Dublin-born Field. Like Ott, most pianists play the 18 that are so numbered. Some add the other three: The Troubadour, the Op posth Nocturne in B flat and Dernière pensée. The project is another example of Ott’s wanting to avoid the well-trodden path. So what inspired this particular journey? ‘Field was not part of my life until the pandemic. I was just browsing the streaming platforms and I came across the very few recordings of the complete nocturnes. I thought, “It’s actually really embarrassing that I don’t know any of them,” and so I started listening and then I really fell in love with this world. I didn’t even know when John Field lived. It’s very interesting. Sometimes when I now talk about him, people think he’s a contemporary composer because his name sounds so contemporary somehow, and I have to tell them, “No, he’s a contemporary of Beethoven.”’

She began work on the nocturnes in earnest at the end of July last year, recording them at the very end of September and the beginning of October. ‘I looked at the Field sonatas and other things, but in the end I thought it would be more interesting to rediscover the nocturnes. After all, they are the originals of one of the most beloved forms of music.’ There have been numerous earlier recordings of the Field nocturnes, from John O’Conor back in 1990 (Telarc) and Benjamin Frith (Naxos) to Ewa Pobłocka (20 of them on an 1838 Erard for the Frédéric Chopin Institute) and, most recently, Tyler Hay on Piano Classics (2023). Ott’s is a first for DG.

Alice Sara Ott recorded John Field’s set of 18 nocturnes for Deutsche Grammophon in September and October 2024 at the Meistersaal in her home town of Berlin (photo: Andy Staples)

Each DG album cover and booklet makes the most of the photogenic Ms Ott – the camera loves her. But the smouldering model of the photographic studio could not be further from the cheery, self-assured – and almost perpetually smiling – person I’m chatting with. She laughs easily. Everything is a positive. Even when, towards the end of our Zoom call, having spotted a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, I venture a query about whom her partner might be, she rebuffs me with the most charming dismissal. ‘I never talk in public about my private life,’ she smiles. ‘I’m married, but I do not talk about it.

‘Being a little control freak,’ she reveals, ‘I have to be on top of everything. So the booklet text I write myself and I get on everyone’s nerves – I mean, I think everyone who’s working with me knows this part of me. But I also listen to all the takes. We had 769 takes and I listened to each of them, so after the recording I spent 14 days at home just listening to them and trying to choose the right one within the context of the piece. And so it was a very intense bubble that I was in. Now I’m out of it and there’s nothing I can do about it any more. We’ve done the photos, the videos, the recording – then in 2025 I will start playing the programme in combination with Beethoven.’

Hmm. Beethoven sonatas interspersed with Field nocturnes. It’s an intriguing combination. Why Beethoven? ‘When I started listening to the nocturnes I could not put my finger on whether the music belonged to the Classical era or the Romantic. Sometimes I would hear the serenity and the simplicity of Mozart, sometimes the wit and harmonical twist of an early Beethoven. Then there were all these cascades and the melancholy that already hint at the later Chopin. So it was all these impressions I had, but the composer I thought about the most was Beethoven. When I was putting a recital together for the live concerts, I knew John Field was not a big enough name to sell a programme, so I had to combine it with some other composer. The obvious choice would have been Chopin or maybe Liszt – who spent a lot of time editing Field’s nocturnes; I even thought about Mendelssohn for a while. But what kept coming up was this connection to Beethoven. There are so many parts where I thought, “How interesting – that sounds like Beethoven, this reminds me of Beethoven.” I thought it would be really interesting to put these two composers into one programme, two composers who lived at the same time.’

In choosing which Beethoven sonatas to pair with the Field nocturnes, Ott did not look for the most ‘Fieldesque’ but the ones which she felt fitted into the same world: the early Op 49 No 1 in two movements, and Op 109. ‘Let me show you something,’ she says, taking her laptop over to the grand piano. ‘You know, the Moonlight Sonata was not named by Beethoven – it’s kind of misleading because everybody always imagines this romantic moonlight scenery, but Beethoven was actually inspired by Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the scene where Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore.’ She illustrates by playing the triplet accompaniment of the Moonlight, then the same idea in Mozart and then exactly the same idea repeated in Field’s E minor Nocturne. All three have the same tum-ti-tah dotted rhythm of a typical funeral march. ‘There is no proof that Field was inspired by Beethoven or by Mozart, but I thought it would be really interesting to show these two composers who have similarities but also great differences: one a great composer who becomes this immortal figure and inspires future generations; the other a very successful composer who today is almost forgotten.

‘For the first two or three lines of the Field you think this is actually really simple music, but then he starts to surprise you with a harmonical or rhythmical twist. Then he has this moment of pain – but you never stop at this pain, you just pass by. You see something under the surface for a second, then it’s gone and vanishes into nothing. With Beethoven it’s the opposite. Beethoven actually pulls you in and tears you apart from the inside. He uses the whole space, the whole architecture. Field writes the left hand pianissimo so you almost don’t hear it under the surface [she plays it], and then he writes this painful melody in the right hand. This gives the listener the feeling that they are actually watching a scene instead of being inside it. Being inside it is Beethoven.’

While Ott is reluctant to reveal anything of her private life, she is more than happy to discuss her early life, details of which, despite the extensive number of websites devoted to her career and achievements, are hard to come by. She was born in Munich in 1988. How did her German father meet her Japanese mother? ‘My father is an engineer in electronics. It’s actually embarrassing, but I have no idea what exactly he does! Anyway, that was his field, and originally he applied for an internship in the States but it was all full, so his second choice was Japan. And that’s where he met my mother. She already had a piano class in Tokyo at that time, quite a big class of students, but they both still had to finish studying. For one year they lived apart. She stayed in Japan, he was in Germany. And then they decided to get married and she moved to Germany. Today, it’s so easy to stay in touch. I’m grateful that we live in such a time, because I’m always travelling, which really allows me to keep in contact with my loved ones. But at that time, my parents could only speak once in half a year by phone, so they would send each other letters which would arrive with a delay of two weeks or something.’ Quite a courageous move by her mother, I suggest. ‘Yes, she definitely has a very strong personality. I mean, she had to. When she came to Germany, at first there were not that many foreigners, especially where my dad studied, in Braunschweig [Lower Saxony]. And, you know, people were not always kind.’

English is Ott’s third language, which she speaks fluently and rapidly with an American inflection. Words and thoughts tumble out, an unstoppable stream, before she halts, backtracks and rephrases. ‘So Mama is where the music comes from, studying and teaching piano before she met my father. He is not musical at all. He loves to come to concerts, and it’s interesting to talk to him about them because his perception is very different. I find that fascinating. Of course, my [younger] sister [Mona Asuka Ott, also a pianist], my mother and I have our musical training so we analyse things and see them from a totally different perspective from my father. He can’t even hold a note or clap in rhythm.

‘I wanted to become a pianist when I was three years old. My mother was not very happy about this idea. It took a year to convince her. So I was four when I had my first piano lesson, and in the same year I played in front of – I don’t know – 50 people. Really short pieces. But the first memorable experience was this competition in Munich. The final concert was in the Herkulessaal and I played a piece called The Clown by Kabalevsky. That was the first time that I played in front of such a big audience – maybe 800 people. I was probably five and I had a memory slip. But after playing the piece, bowing and then receiving this applause, it gave me a kind of a feeling of confirmation, because I finally felt that people from the adult world were listening to me and giving me a little bit of attention. I was really fascinated that there could be this one person on stage who could make an audience silent for such a long time. There’s this communication that goes beyond words, and words were what I was struggling with at that time. Almost every child at that age has problems, of course, but being raised bilingual probably made it a little more complicated.’

From the age of 12 she began studying with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and from age 16 onwards was playing concerts regularly. DG signed her when she was 19. ‘The lessons got fewer and fewer so I never really graduated, but Kämmerling was my most important teacher. There were some incredible musicians in my class, among them Igor Levit, and so that is one reason why I never had this feeling of being a prodigy, because I was no one special in this class at all.’ Kämmerling, who died in 2012 at the age of 82, would give masterclasses all over the world, sometimes 10 each year, and his devoted pupils would try to get to as many as possible. ‘There was always a small group of people who would follow him. And every night after practising all day and having lessons with him, there was a small class concert. So we had to play in front of each other, and in a way, that was probably the toughest part of it.’

In terms of her activities outside the world of classical music, you could say that Ott comes out of left field. She has designed a signature line of high-end leather bags for Jost (Germany) and, as DG’s artist biography tells us, ‘has also worked closely with the French jewellery house Chaumet … and the German jeweller Wempe’. What the online biography does not mention is that in 2019 Ott was diagnosed with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis. Although at the time this was terrifying for her (she thought her fast-paced career might be over), the disease is now firmly under control thanks to the huge advances in medical science. It seems to have had no effect on the vision and energy she brings to her multifarious projects. Her current season residency at the TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht, for instance, includes ‘a really interesting programme with friends of mine’. They will be playing Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, performing the work alongside visual elements produced by Andrew Staples, ‘who is not only a singer but an incredible videographer as well. He will create a digital installation using lights and projectors’; another programme curated by Ott is based on Schubert’s Trout Quintet interspersed with songs by Beethoven, Schubert and Vaughan Williams; and then, of course, there’s also the Beethoven and Field recital. There have been further performances of the Piano Concerto written for her by the classical-rock musician Bryce Dessner, premiered in January 2024 and composed in honour of his sister, Jessica, a choreographer and dancer who is fighting cancer. A recording is promised in the future.

What else can we expect? How far in advance does she plan? ‘You know, it’s funny, because in my home I like to keep things neat and orderly, but when it comes to my creativity I’m very messy. I don’t plan that much, I’m very bad at keeping a schedule and organising things. Then a project comes and I get 200 per cent into it. I have to accept my limits, and adjust accordingly. It’s work in progress.’ It seems we can expect much more of the unexpected from the unstoppable, versatile and petite force of nature that is the talented Ms Ott.

Alice Sara Ott’s disc of Field’s nocturnes is released on DG in February