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 palms, was by her facet (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 world profession, recording greater than a dozen albums and showing with high ensembles. She has grow to be a drive for change in classical music, embracing new approaches (taking part in Chopin on beat-up pianos in Iceland) and railing towards stuffy live performance tradition (she performs with out sneakers, discovering it extra comfy).
And Ott, who lives in Munich and has roots in Germany and Japan, has completed so whereas grappling with sickness. In 2019, when she was 30, she was recognized with a number of sclerosis. She says she has not proven any signs since beginning therapy, however the dysfunction has made her mirror on the music trade’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 the best way to 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 prompt that the sickness has affected her taking part in.
She mentioned she felt she had no alternative however to be clear, saying it was necessary to point out that individuals with a number of sclerosis could lead on full lives.
“I don’t contemplate it as a weak point,” she mentioned. “It’s a reality. I dwell with it. And I don’t need to make a giant drama out of it.”
Ott’s colleagues describe her as an adventurous musician who has helped carry new audiences to classical music with experiments like “Echoes of Life,” a mission that blends Chopin preludes with modern 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 a number of months after she started therapy, mentioned that from the beginning, Ott had a “don’t child me” perspective about her sickness.
“She is ready to go to a really stunning and fragile place, nevertheless it’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 review with the famend instructor Karl-Heinz Kämmerling.
After successful a collection 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 costume. She generally confronted sexism; a colleague as soon as informed her to play a passage of Beethoven like a “cute little Japanese lady,” she mentioned. And her packed touring schedule was taking a toll on her as a musician, she mentioned.
“I felt like individuals 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 looking for 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 embellished the stage with magenta duct tape and invited the viewers to clap together with the music.
“You may 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 immediately.”
In 2018, on tour in Japan, Ott started to expertise well being issues, feeling some numbness in her lips and later having issue strolling.
Her docs mentioned her signs had been most likely brought on by stress. However when she returned residence to Munich after one other tour a pair months later, half of her physique went numb. After present process assessments, she acquired her prognosis: relapsing-remitting a number of sclerosis, the most typical type, during which signs can flare up and dissipate.
At first, Ott mentioned, she was “scared as hell” and panicked. However she additionally anxious about upsetting her household. “There have been numerous occasions,” she mentioned, “after I simply locked myself someplace and cried.”
Her solely data 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 acquired her prognosis, she misplaced management of her left hand whereas taking part in 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 fashionable therapies, she grew extra optimistic, particularly since her sickness was within the early phases. In February 2019, a couple of month after her prognosis, she posted about it on Instagram.
“An acknowledgment just isn’t a weak point,” she wrote, “however a technique to shield and acquire 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 in every of Ott’s albums final fall prompt 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 alternative of repertoire and that she had plans for extra albums. She mentioned that such reductive labeling was “the precise motive why it’s nonetheless so arduous for a lot of to come back out and speak about their very own circumstances.”
In New York, Ott will carry out Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Main with the conductor Karina Canellakis, who can be making her Philharmonic debut, in a program that features works by Webern, Strauss and Scriabin. (Final yr, the 2 had been featured performing Beethoven in ads 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 evokes 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 current night, she went to the Blue Be aware 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 once we unite in it,” she mentioned. “We have now to be weak. That is without doubt one of the most stunning sources of togetherness and power.”
