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Alice Sara Ott plays Liszt Liebestraum No 3
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Alice Sara Ott play Beethoven Concerto No 3
It’s as slick and sleek as any advert can be: red dress, black and white piano keys, swiftly switching responses. At the summons of a search on ‘Beethoven Op 1’, the pianist plays a flourish from a piano trio; but the pictured user then types an extra ‘5’ and suddenly we’re hearing ‘Op 15’, the Piano Concerto No 1. As if by magic, an orchestra appears, and a conductor, Karina Canellakis; and with one more click, spatial audio enlivens the sound. The advert for the new Apple Music Classical app features, as the scarlet-clad soloist, Alice Sara Ott. And it is all over in just half a minute.
Starring in an advertisement was a new experience for the Japanese-German pianist. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ Ott says with a laugh, speaking to me via video call from her home in Munich. ‘We were at Alexandra Palace in north London, there were 600 people there, it took two days to film and the clip is just 30 seconds long!’ She was impressed by the care and detail that seemed to go into every shot: ‘I think the look of it really speaks to a new generation.’
Where reaching beyond conventional classical audiences is concerned, Ott is a woman with a mission. At 35, she has
