The Swedish mezzo-soprano brings a fraction of her repertoire to New Zealand this week.
Anne Sofie von Otter, photo/Mats Bäcker
Anne Sofie von Otter defies categorisation. Of course she’s right to sing whatever she likes and we’re wrong to try to pigeonhole our favourite singers and call them “Verdi singers” or “Mozart singers”, expecting them to specialise in early music, contemporary music, lieder or opera and being shocked when they lower the lights and launch into Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill or even Abba.
But Swedish mezzo-soprano von Otter tackles the lot; yes, even her compatriots Abba. Sadly, there’s no way we can hope for the full von Otter experience from just two appearances in New Zealand this month but I’m grateful for what we are getting.
In Wellington, with the Vector Wellington Orchestra, she will sing some of Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne, and in Auckland there will be a Town Hall recital with her regular pianist, Bengt Forsberg, that includes just some of her musical interests: Nielsen, Stenhammar, Grieg and Sibelius tell of her Scandinavian background; Schubert and Liszt provide the mainstream European lieder content; and in the second half there is Percy Grainger, Canteloube again, as well as some Weill (although no Abba). For the rest, it’s time to check through the CD catalogues and to be amazed at her versatility and musicianship.
It’s her first visit to New Zealand. “Well, I couldn’t wait any longer,” she says on the phone from Stockholm. “I’ve kept putting it off. I had wanted to bring my children when they were young – but now they’re adults and don’t want to come, so finally I decided that I’m just going to go.”
That may be a simplification. Promoter Roger King, who has masterminded the visit, heard from a colleague in Australia that Sydney Opera House was bringing her out for its recital series in the Utzon Room and he got on the phone to von Otter’s management to see if there was any chance of her coming on to New Zealand as well. It turned out she had a week between then and her next stop, San Francisco. “And so,” von Otter says, “I’m finally on my way!”
It was when von Otter started singing in the choir at school that she discovered “singing Bach motets and Bach oratorios was absolutely divine – I learnt a lot from doing that”. In 1981, she went to London to study at the Guildhall School of Music with Vera Rózsa – the same formidable Hungarian who 10 years before had taken Kiri Te Kanawa in hand.
“She was terribly important to me. The way she wanted to hear me sing – and I think Kiri as well – was with a lot of head voice [and] not to sing too heavily.” Rózsa told her what she should be singing – roles such as Cherubino in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Octavian in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. She wanted her to do competitions, and pushed her to find an agent. “All very sound and good advice.”
Those “trouser” roles Rózsa had in mind for her were marvellous parts to sing. “The music is wonderful; Cherubino was an excellent role to start with, Octavian has character, comedy, drama and sheer beauty, but I’ve left them behind now. I’ve had enough of those hothead, naive boys – they were great fun but I have no longing to sing them again.”
In 1986, von Otter started working with London-based New Zealander David Harper. “Vera was not pleased,” she says, emphasising the “not”, and she drops into a heavy Hungarian accent as she mimics, “He was only a coach!” – Rózsa’s putdown of someone she thought of as just a pianist. For von Otter, however, Harper is considerably more.
“He has this very, very fine ear for singers, he knows so much about soft palates, hard palates and all that technical what-have-you. He’s a very good vocal teacher and I still work with him from time to time.”
Also in the 80s, von Otter started recording the baroque repertoire. “Well, there’s so much of it,” she says, laughing. “I think it’s something that suits my temperament and my voice quite well. I worked a lot with John Eliot Gardiner up until 2000; we gave so many concerts and made so many recordings. We were a really good team.” It was not only baroque she recorded with Eliot Gardiner, but also a live recording of Mozart’s Idomeneo and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. She still finds baroque important, and has made exciting recordings of Handel operas with both William Christie and Marc Minkowski.
More recently, von Otter has moved to Wagner, which must be vocally as far removed from baroque music or Mozart’s Cherubino as one can get. “Yes, Wagner is very different, but I don’t do a lot. There has been one role on stage [Waltraute in Götterdämmerung, conducted by Simon Rattle, at both the Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg Festivals], and then I did Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen in a semi-staged concert performance by Peter Sellars where I got to stand far forward. I enjoy singing Wagner immensely, but if I sang Wagner all the time it would quickly burn my voice out. Just now and again is perfect.”
She has made two albums of Swedish songs with Forsberg. The most recent, Watercolours, is by composers whose names are all new to me. “There’s an enormous wealth of Swedish lieder from the late-19th century up to the mid-20th century,” von Otter explains. Her Auckland recital opens with a song by the Dane Carl Nielsen, followed by three songs by the wonderful Swedish composer Wilhelm Stenhammar. And there are songs by Grieg and Sibelius. “Sibelius has written so many songs and the best of them are so good; he’s a composer I never get tired of. I almost always include him in my programmes; [his songs] are just a little different – they don’t sound like everyone else’s, and are very enjoyable.”
Alarmingly, von Otter once told the Guardian that “some interviewers are like zombies, you want to slap them”. But on the phone she has told me so much about music and singing that I risk telling her I had hoped for some Schumann in the recital. And that one particular song, Dein Angesicht, as I listen makes me feel her musicianship, and her musical unity with Forsberg, had been specially created for Schumann. “It is very, very beautiful,” she says. “But it is one of those songs that is so beautiful that you almost feel you don’t want to sing it too often. You want it to sound as fresh as the first time you heard it. There are songs like that, that are so great that I don’t want to wear them out.”
I find it impossible to think of von Otter ever “wearing a song out”.
ANNE SOFIE VON OTTER, Auckland Town Hall, November 16; Wellington Town Hall, November 18.