Alice Sara Ott - Alice Sara Ott plays Debussy, Satie & Liszt (2023)

Pianist Alice Sara Ott was well known as a child prodigy. She has parlayed that fame into an adult career that has included critical acclaim and a contract with the Deutsche Grammophon label that resulted in an innovative collaboration with electronic musician Ólafur Arnalds.

Ott was born in Munich on August 1, 1988. Her father was a civil engineer, her mother a pianist. Ott took up the piano at four, and the following year, she reached the final round of a youth competition in Munich, playing before a full house. At seven, she won Germany's Jugend Musiziert competition, a win followed by a long series of youth contest victories. At 12, Ott matriculated at the Salzburg Mozarteum, studying with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling. In 2005, she appeared as the soloist in the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23, with the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra; reaction was strongly favorable, and since then, she has often toured in Japan as well as in the U.S. and Europe, where a 2008 performance as a last-minute substitute for Murray Perahia drew a standing ovation and broadened her reputation.

The following year, Ott released her debut recording on the Deutsche Grammophon label, a recital devoted to Liszt's Transcendental Etudes. A live Ott performance of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major with the Munich Philharmonic was recorded by the label and issued in 2010. Ott has gone on to make more than ten recordings with Deutsche Grammophon. An exception was one of Ott's most publicized releases, The Chopin Project, a collaboration with electronic musician Ólafur Arnalds. In 2019, Ott announced that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but she continued to perform and record. In 2021, on Deutsche Grammophon, she released the album Wonderland, devoted to the music of Edvard Grieg. © James Manheim