My Favorite Mezzo, Anne Sofie von Otter, Hits 50

[Ralph]

Super von trouper

The great mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter tells Stephen Moss why she has decided to release an LP of Abba covers

Stephen Moss
Friday August 5, 2005

Guardian

It's not often that Mahler and Abba's Benny Andersson, Rückert-Lieder and The Winner Takes It All, get mentioned in the same breath, but here's a chance. Tonight the Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter sings Mahler's Rückert-Lieder at the Proms with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (and late-replacement Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, which should make things interesting). In her recordings the splendidly game-for-anything Von Otter has been steadily working through the output of her compatriots, and has now reached the revered work of Benny Andersson - her next disc, I Let the Music Speak, will be Abba covers and songs from his musicals. Super Trouper!

Von Otter is waiting for me outside the apartment block in the centre of Stockholm where she lives with her theatre director husband and two teenage sons. I guess this greeting is deliberate - a way of not letting me see inside her flat. Instead, she guides me across the road to a cafe on the edge of a vast lake that, despite dodgy weather, she has decided should be the venue for our tête-à-tête. Slim, bronzed and healthy-looking in that uniquely Scandinavian way, she chooses an apple juice, sniffing it to make sure it's fresh; I have a cappuccino with two sugars. It may be a cultural thing.

She has confessed to being "reserved" and a "control freak", and is a little wary of interviews. Or perhaps she is bored by them - by familiar questions of how she began singing and what her favourite operatic roles are. "Some interviewers are like zombies," she says. "You want to slap them." Having just stepped off a plane, I feel zombie-like and hurriedly suggest the photographer goes first - planting the uncomplaining Von Otter next to trees, on soaking benches, and dangerously near the edge of the lake - while I rethink my questions.

Things start slowly, zombie-ishly even, but gradually we warm up. Her answers are careful, her face composed, but every so often it is illuminated by a gorgeous smile. Oddly, the question which breaks the ice is the one I had most feared asking: will being 50 - she celebrated her birthday recently - affect her career? "Not really," she insists. "I felt the way my career was going and what I was singing changed earlier, maybe around 42 or 43. It wasn't so obvious that I should be singing Cherubino [in The Marriage of Figaro] or Rosenkavalier any more. These young men . . . Who wants to sing them when you're past 50? I had my big chance to sing Carmen a few years ago at Glyndebourne. That was fantastic, and I did Mélisande [in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande], which was also very new to me."

But being 50 is, she admits, a challenge - especially for a singer, who has to worry about appearance, voice, public profile, competition from younger rivals, the works. "At my age you have to fight for your career much more than you do when you're 30," she says. "A 50-year-old woman is not as interesting as a 25 to 35-year-old woman. It goes for every film actress or singer. Youth is very sexy."

What about the voice - is that changing? "A little bit. I'm not 20 any more. I can hear it. But I don't think it's a bad thing. It's a little broader than it used to be, has more volume in the lower and middle registers. The vibrato changes too. Everything is a bit bigger, a bit slower, but not in an embarrassing way. I'm enjoying using my voice in a different way. I'm using more of it and I am enjoying that. Ten or 15 years ago, using the mass of the voice didn't interest me. Then I was looking for a thinner, more instrumental sound. I did a lot of baroque music and Mozart. I'm still doing baroque and Mozart but not as much, and therefore I can use my voice in a different way. I still love Bach and Handel, of course, and Rameau, but it's fun to do other stuff. It's like being a sportsman and going from short distance to long distance, or high jump to long jump. It's still your body, but you use it in a different way."

Her next Olympic event will be Wagner: she plans to sing Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde under Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2007 and Waltraute in the Ring under Simon Rattle in 2009. "I've always said I would never sing Wagner because it didn't suit me, but now I'm not so sure," she says. "I'm not your really luxurious, big, dramatic voice. I'll never be that. But in the right houses and with the right collaborators it can work."

Unlike many singers, who want directors to play it straight, and storm out if The Flying Dutchman is set in a nuclear submarine, Von Otter likes big concepts. She also wants opera to be more than a fairy tale; to have meaning for a modern audience. "When I was in Basel [her first job, in the mid-1980s, was with the opera company there] we had one particular director, a Frenchman, who was very intense and modern. He tended towards the German way of staging opera, and I liked that very much. I never really enjoy the gold and the prancing around and big parades. The shows I've enjoyed are the ones that are good theatre."

She was disappointed that, at Glyndebourne in 2002, director David McVicar didn't opt for a more Nordic Carmen. "I don't look like your Spanish Gypsy," she says, so I was assuming he would do something different." She will reprise the role in Santa Fe next year with a Swedish director of her own choosing, so expect the unexpected.

Von Otter's willingness to take on new challenges and cross genres is legendary: as well as excelling in opera, lieder and oratorio, she has also collaborated with Elvis Costello on the pop release For the Stars and produced an album of Christmas songs. "I did my Christmas disc and the Benny Andersson [album] because I like that music," she says. "I don't make extra money from them or hope to change the world with them. The disc with Costello came about because he, like me, is a very hungry musician. He wants to go into every corner and see what you can do."

The varied nature of her repertoire, she says, was never planned; it just fell out that way. "I didn't start singing because I wanted to sing Puccini or Wagner. I had no intention of being a singer when I was a teenager; it was only when I started singing in a choir at school that I realised how much I enjoyed singing as opposed to playing the piano or the flute. It was my instrument and I went where it led me."

Her father was a diplomat with a taste for organ music and Gregorian chant, but she didn't start singing lessons until she was 16 and didn't get a foothold in the operatic repertoire until she went to study at the Guildhall in London in her mid-20s. "I started late," she says. "Others started taking singing lessons much earlier and already knew the famous opera arias when they were 18. I had no clue; I hadn't been to the opera many times when I was 18. But when I got to the Guildhall, my teacher Vera Rozsa didn't waste any time: she told me what roles I should be doing and which agent I should audition for."

The timing was perfect in terms of establishing a recording career. It was the beginning of the CD era and she was soon given an exclusive deal by Deutsche Grammophon. "I recorded all the Mozart and Strauss operas; everything that was suitable for my voice," she says. "It is a shame for those singers now who would give their life to record Rosenkavalier."

But she reckons her natural reserve means she will never quite become a stadium superstar. "I'm not Kiri [Te Kanawa] or Renee Fleming or Cecilia Bartoli," she says. "I'll never be a megastar in that way. I'm not the right type. And anyway I don't think I would like it. I'm not the million-dollar baby. You need to play the part all the time. Once I'm off stage I switch off and then I'm myself."

Von Otter insists on her privacy. "I am outgoing only with the people that I know very well. I don't want people to come to think they know me really well unless they do. I want the audience to adore what I'm doing, the way I sing a song, the way I interpret the music. But I don't necessarily want them to adore me. I don't see why they should."

She loves Sweden and does not, unlike many successful classical artists, have homes elsewhere. She is also careful to regulate the amount of time she spends away and the number of engagements she takes on. "I don't want to produce the whole time. It's not good for you to have the feeling that you are exposing yourself every other night. That changes you. You need to be in your own environment, with your friends and family. At least I do."

I ask if she has to wonder yet about the life expectancy of her voice: "I think I've still got quite a few years ahead of me where nothing, hopefully, will go wrong with the voice. When you're 60 it's not so easy any more. With 50 you're at your peak. You know technically what you are doing. I still take singing lessons; you are learning more about how to sing and not get tired. I want to be able to do all the things with my voice that I want to. I don't suppose I'll ever be able to achieve that, but I'm still working hard at it."

· Anne Sofie von Otter sings Mahler's Rückert-Lieder tonight at the Proms, Royal Albert Hall, London SW7. Box office: 020-7589 8212. I Let the Music Speak will be released next year on Deutsche Grammophon