Anne Sofie von Otter isn’t slowing down. At seventy, the Swedish mezzo-soprano’s season includes everything from Monteverdi and Handel to Debussy and Samuel Barber on the operatic stage, and recitals ranging from Schubert Lieder and French chanson to Weimar cabaret, including in an appearance in May at London’s Cadogan Hall.
“I am a very happy, fortunate lady to be involved in all these projects!” von Otter tells us. “I am in the midst of a spring of opera.” In January she made her role debut as the Old Baroness in Samuel Barber’s Vanessa with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, followed by a run of Giulio Cesare in Zurich with Cecilia Bartoli, Carlo Vistoli, Max Emanuel Cencic, and Kangmin Justin Kim. “A fantastic cast!” she enthuses.
She goes on to sing Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea in Copenhagen in a production by Christoph Marthaler before going to Berlin for a run of Pelléas et Mélisande with an all-star cast. She’s full of praise for the conductors she works with this season: Gianluca Capuano (“the Handel wizard”), Lars Ulrik Mortensen (“also a wizard in the pit”), and François-Xavier Roth (“another wonderful conductor”).
With an operatic career starting in the early 1980’s, after von Otter’s studies at London’s Guildhall School with Vera Rózsa; the Hungarian teacher’s other students in that era included Kiri Te Kanawa and Karita Mattila. Her Royal Opera House debut came in 1985, as Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro; her debuts at La Scala and the Met soon followed. She would also go on to record a series of operas and oratorios by Handel, Purcell, Gluck, Mozart, and Berlioz with John Eliot Gardiner, Marc Minkowski, René Jacobs, Claudio Abbado, Georg Solti and Giuseppe Sinopoli.
But the lyric mezzo repertoire has its limits – one can only play teenage boys like Cherubino and Strauss’ Octavian for so long – and after excursions into Wagner, von Otter dove headlong into contemporary opera. In recent years, she’s created roles in Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel, Péter Eötvös’ Senza Sangue, and Sebastian Fagerlund’s Autumn Sonata.
“Later in the summer I will be performing in the summer festival in Bregenz in The Passion of the Common Man by Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnarson and librettist Royce Vavrek,” she tells me, followed by a return to her hometown of Stockholm for a revival of Mikael Karlsson and Royce Vavrek’s Melancholia. “It premiered in 2023 and was a huge success – completely and utterly sold out!”
In parallel with her operatic career, von Otter has long championed the song repertoire, with award-winning recordings of German Lieder by Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Wolf, and Mahler as well as Nordic repertoire by Grieg, Sibelius, and Stenhammar. She’s also ventured outside the realm of classical, recording everything from Weill to French chanson to ABBA with collaborators including the singer-songwriter Elvis Costello and jazz pianist Brad Meldhau.
“Nowadays, programmes are frequently much more varied than they were, say, 50 years ago,” she says. “Audiences today can hear an all-Schubert programme or cutting-edge new commissions, lute songs, opera arias, or mixed-bags starting with Monteverdi and ending with The Beatles – sounds like me! It’s a wonderful thing, but it does require a will to communicate with your audience. A certain maturity and daring is needed: here I am, now listen to what I have to offer.”
Repertoire aside, how does the recital format differ from the operatic stage? “The biggest change is volume: you need to sing much louder in opera to carry over the orchestra. It’s many, many metres from us onstage to the ears in the auditorium. Apart from that you need the same focus, the same preparation, the same amount of adrenaline whether singing Lieder, orchestral songs, or opera.”
“I feel I can do a lot more with my voice in a recital,” she says. “Flexibility and colors can come into play. That is something I talk to young singers about when I teach: vary the way you sing! Beware of being boring and don’t sing in a monochrome way. Use your words and your phrases, and work hard with whomever is playing with you to build your own interpretation.”
This May, von Otter appears in recital at Cadogan Hall in a varied programme that ranges from Reynaldo Hahn and Cécile Chaminade to cabaret songs by Weill, Charles Trenet, and Barbara. “It’s a place I have walked past many times in my childhood when I lived with my parents in London,” she says. “I didn’t realize how one pronounced ‘Cadogan’ until very recently though!”
“A vocal recital can be a marvellous thing! Unfortunately, many recital series have folded and for the younger generations it is really hard to get the opportunity,” she laments. Alongside von Otter’s performance, Cadogan Hall’s Edith Presents series includes appearances by Jennifer Johnson and Sumi Jo. “A recital is the chance to truly be your own boss, and to carefully choose the repertoire and decide how you want to present it. What to wear, which mood to set, even the lighting can be your choice!”
The first half of the programme combines the turn-of-the-century mélodie of Hahn and Chaminade with the French chanson of Barbara, Trenet, Léo Ferré. “I grew up listening to music on the radio a lot and in those days you could frequently hear Édith Piaf, Yves Montand, and Jacques Brel,” she explains. “When I was in my late teens, I spent a summer learning French in Montpellier, and that was another chance to listen to chansons over some late-night wine whilst flirting with the French boys!”
But she wouldn’t try her hand at that repertoire until much later in life. “In later years, my husband loved playing CD’s with Yves Montand and Charles Trenet in our kitchen. That’s when it really hit me that I wanted to try and sing these wonderful songs myself. Those artists were often classically-trained composers and pianists, and the music is really quite close to Hahn, Chaminade, and also occasionally Fauré and Poulenc.” Together with her frequent collaborator Bengt Forsberg, she recorded much of this repertoire in 2014’s Grammy Award-winning Douce France.
The second half of the programme moves to Weimar, combining songs by Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Der blaue Engel composer Friedrich Hollaender with lesser-known composers including Werner Richard Heymann, Peter Kreuder, Michael Jary. “The German Kabarettlieder were less familiar to me although I had sung and recorded a lot of Kurt Weill,” she explains. “It was through meeting Barrie Kosky that the idea came up for me to immerse myself in the German popular repertoire from the 20th century and put together a show at the Komische Oper Berlin. It’s an époque that Barrie is very knowledgeable about!”
“He recommended that I work with the pianist Adam Benz to familiarize myself with the Weimar composers – what Adam doesn’t know about the Berlin song repertoire isn’t worth knowing! We have since recorded these wonderful songs by Hollaender, Eisler, Weill, and many others, and it’s coming out this summer. The songs are catchy, have interesting witty lyrics, and are very fun to sing!”
“A vocal recital can be a very personal and intimate thing,” she reflects. “It’s just you, the pianist – in most cases – and your audience. It’s a huge responsibility and can be quite scary!” But von Otter won’t be onstage alone: she’ll be joined by pianist Johan Siberg, guitarist Fabian Frederiksson, and accordionist Bengan Janson. “So I’ll be singing a bunch of Weimar with my Swedish lads in Cadogan Hall as well as the French chansons and maybe some Swedish folk music. A mixed bag is often my thing!”
Anne Sofie von Otter performs at Cadogan Hall on 21st May.
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This article was sponsored by Cadogan Hall.
