By falling on the clip showing him drifting at dusk, on a lake, to the sound of a melody by Mendelssohn, or on a photo of him, shirtless, on Instagram, even on a video posted on his Facebook account, showing him off diving into a Thai swimming pool, some may have wondered if Andreas Ottensamer was not one of those disposable products regularly produced by the recording industry. Quite the opposite: son of the late Ernst Ottensamer, legendary principal clarinetist of the Vienna Philharmonic, and brother of Daniel Ottensamer, holding the same position in the orchestra of the city’s opera house, Andreas is principal clarinetist of the Vienna Philharmonic. Berlin, where its round and full-bodied sound has worked wonders for ten years.
He simply understood the power of the image and, following having played in chamber music alongside Murray Perahia, Leif Ove Andsnes or Yo-Yo Ma, now surrounds himself with the younger and more media-friendly Gautier Capuçon and Yuja Wang , with which he has just recorded a new CD, to be released in September. It will include, among other things, the Trio in A minor, op. 114, by Brahms, which he has already performed on tour and whose adagio, in the key of D major, allows him to recall his mastery of the breath, all the more astounding since he does not use the German system Boehm, which has become the planetary standard, but the Austrian, signed Oehler, with a wider mouthpiece.
exciting proposal
In the meantime, the Gstaad festival, founded by Yehudi Menuhin and whose theme for the 68th edition is Vienna, has given him carte blanche for three concerts. Suffice to say that his proposal promises to be the most exciting of the event, from the world premiere of a piece by pianist and composer Dejan Lazić, to a concert with the legendary Vienna Children’s Choir, founded in 1498 by the Emperor Maximilian Iᵉʳ, in which Schubert sang, and who collaborated with Biber, Mozart and Bruckner. The most atypical evening remains the one he will devote, with the assistance of Bela Koreny, a figure of Viennese theater and jazz, to Georg Kreisler, whose humorous songs will be judiciously framed by classics of the Vienna School, signed Berg, Schönberg and Webern, as well as transcriptions of lieder by Mahler. Rare are those who know Georg Kreisler, forced to flee Vienna in 1938, because of Nazism, and who following having found refuge in the United States, where his very politically incorrect humor shocked, returned in 1955 to Europe, where he performed in the cabarets of Berlin, Vienna and Munich, before passing away at his home in Salzburg in 2011. That Andreas Ottensamer, who might be content to bewitch the planet with his eloquent transcriptions of romance without words of Mendelssohn, has chosen to pay homage to him, is to his credit.