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The pianist Alice Sara Ott, barefoot and carrying a silver bracelet, was smiling and singing to herself the opposite day as she practiced a jazzy passage of Ravel at Steinway Corridor in Midtown Manhattan. A Nintendo Change, which she makes use of to heat up her arms, was by her aspect (one other favored software is a Rubik’s Dice). A shot of espresso sat untouched on the ground.
“I really feel I’ve lastly discovered my voice,” Ott mentioned throughout a break. “I really feel I can lastly be myself.”
Ott, 35, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut this week, has constructed a worldwide profession, recording greater than a dozen albums and showing with high ensembles. She has turn into a power for change in classical music, embracing new approaches (enjoying Chopin on beat-up pianos in Iceland) and railing in opposition to stuffy live performance tradition (she performs without shoes, discovering it extra snug).
And Ott, who lives in Munich and has roots in Germany and Japan, has achieved so whereas grappling with sickness. In 2019, when she was 30, she was identified with multiple sclerosis. She says she has not proven any signs since beginning therapy, however the dysfunction has made her mirror on the music business’s grueling work tradition.
“I discovered to simply accept that there’s a restrict and to not transcend that,” she mentioned. “All people is aware of how one can ignore their physique and simply go on. However there’s at all times a payback.”
Ott has used her platform to assist dispel myths about a number of sclerosis, a dysfunction of the central nervous system that may trigger a variety of signs, together with muscle spasms, numbness and imaginative and prescient issues. She has taken to social media to element her struggles and to problem those that have recommended that the sickness has affected her enjoying.
She mentioned she felt she had no selection however to be clear, saying it was vital to point out that individuals with a number of sclerosis may lead full lives.
“I don’t think about it as a weak spot,” she mentioned. “It’s a reality. I dwell with it. And I don’t wish to make a giant drama out of it.”
Ott’s colleagues describe her as an adventurous musician who has helped deliver new audiences to classical music with experiments like “Echoes of Life,” a undertaking that blends Chopin preludes with up to date works, video and Ott’s reflections on life and music.
Bryce Dessner, a composer and a guitarist who wrote a concerto for Ott that she premiered in Zurich this yr, mentioned that “what she brings onstage is so particular to her — it’s like she’s unlocking some type of hidden doorway in every bit that she confronts or interprets.”
The conductor Elim Chan, who carried out with Ott just a few months after she started therapy, mentioned that from the beginning, Ott had a “don’t child me” angle about her sickness.
“She is ready to go to a really stunning and fragile place, but it surely’s additionally very sincere and it has integrity inside it,” Chan mentioned. “After which she flies from there. And that’s one thing I discover very stunning.”
Ott was born in Munich to a Japanese mom, a piano instructor, and a German father, {an electrical} engineer. She started piano classes at 4, drawn to the expressive energy of music, she mentioned, and when she was 12, she began commuting to Salzburg, Austria, to check with the famend instructor Karl-Heinz Kämmerling.
After profitable a sequence of prizes, her profession took off, and at 19, she signed with the celebrated label Deutsche Grammophon. Nonetheless, she started to really feel uneasy about classical music’s emphasis on custom in programming, live performance codecs and gown. She generally confronted sexism; a colleague as soon as instructed her to play a passage of Beethoven like a “cute little Japanese girl,” she mentioned. And her packed touring schedule was taking a toll on her as a musician, she mentioned.
“I felt like folks had been anticipating one thing from me that I couldn’t present,” she mentioned. “I used to be floating round, and I didn’t have stability within the sense of who I used to be as an artist.”
She started to forge her personal path, working with artists just like the experimental composer Ólafur Arnalds to file reimagined variations of Chopin. Anticipating a extra rugged sound, they went trying to find out-of-tune pianos in bars in Reykjavik, Iceland.
In 2014, she launched “Scandale,” an homage to the Ballets Russes, with the pianist and composer Francesco Tristano, that includes works by Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel and Tristano. On tour, they adorned the stage with magenta duct tape and invited the viewers to clap together with the music.
“You’ll be able to actually hear the intelligence in the best way she performs,” Tristano mentioned. “Nothing is left to randomness or sheer virtuosity. She’s past that. She actually needs to make some extent in regards to the music she’s creating — that it’s related as we speak.”
In 2018, on tour in Japan, Ott started to expertise well being issues, feeling some numbness in her lips and later having problem strolling.
Her docs mentioned her signs had been in all probability attributable to stress. However when she returned house to Munich after one other tour a pair months later, half of her physique went numb. After present process assessments, she obtained her prognosis: relapsing-remitting a number of sclerosis, the most typical kind, wherein signs can flare up and dissipate.
At first, Ott mentioned, she was “scared as hell” and panicked. However she additionally nervous about upsetting her household. “There have been numerous instances,” she mentioned, “once I simply locked myself someplace and cried.”
Her solely information of the sickness got here from the story of Jacqueline du Pré, the British cellist who died in 1987, at 42, of problems from a number of sclerosis. On the day Ott obtained her prognosis, she misplaced management of her left hand whereas enjoying a Chopin nocturne at a recital in Munich. She ran offstage, sat on the ground and cried, and canceled the remainder of the live performance.
However as Ott examine trendy remedies, she grew extra optimistic, particularly since her sickness was within the early levels. In February 2019, a couple of month after her prognosis, she posted about it on Instagram.
“An acknowledgment is just not a weak spot,” she wrote, “however a strategy to shield and achieve power, each for oneself and for these round us.”
Ott was praised for her braveness. When she toured, musicians approached her to share their experiences with a number of sclerosis. However her well being challenges additionally drew scrutiny.
When a critic reviewing one of Ott’s albums last fall recommended that its inclusion of some simpler items was associated to her a number of sclerosis, she shot again. On Instagram, she famous that she had defined her selection of repertoire and that she had plans for extra albums. She mentioned that such reductive labeling was “the precise cause why it’s nonetheless so arduous for a lot of to return out and speak about their very own situations.”
In New York, Ott will carry out Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Main with the conductor Karina Canellakis, who can also be making her Philharmonic debut, in a program that features works by Webern, Strauss and Scriabin. (Final yr, the two were featured performing Beethoven in commercials for Apple Music Classical, the expertise big’s streaming service.)
Canellakis mentioned Ott had a “a serenity about her that’s infectious.”
“There’s a way of pure focus,” she mentioned, “and he or she conjures up everybody else round her to imagine that state of being.”
Ott has been refining her interpretation of the Ravel concerto, which she first carried out when she was 17, working to imitate the sound of jazz devices within the piano half.
On a latest night, she went to the Blue Word jazz membership in Manhattan to listen to the Japanese composer and pianist Hiromi. The live performance felt intimate and laid-back, she mentioned: Folks cheered freely, laughed, talked and shared meals and drinks.
Ott mentioned she strives to create comparable connections with audiences.
“Music itself can solely absolutely blossom after we unite in it,” she mentioned. “We’ve to be susceptible. That is among the most stunning sources of togetherness and power.”
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