Alma Deutscher dishes on writing operas, ballroom dancing in Vienna and playing with the VSO
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 19:00:30 +0000
When: Feb. 28, 8 p.m.
Where: Bell Performing Arts Centre, 6250 144 St., Surrey
When: Feb. 29, 30, 8 p.m.
Where: Orpheum Theatre, 601 Smithe, Vancouver
When: March 1, 8 p.m.
Where: Centennial Theatre, 2300 Lonsdale, North Vancouver
Tickets and Info: vancouversymphony.ca
Composer Alma Deutscher premiered her Piano Concerto in E-flat major at the Carinthian Summer Music Festival in Austria in 2017. She also performed her Violin Concerto No. 1 in G at the same event. Only a year earlier, conductor Zubin Mehta premiered her full-length opera, Cinderella, in Vienna. That’s quite an impressive list of achievement for any classical musician.
Deutscher was 12.
Born in Basingstoke, England, in 2005, the musical prodigy composed her first piano sonata at age six. At seven, she had penned a short opera based upon author Neil Gaiman’s short story the Sweeper of dreams. Three years later, she produced Cinderella.
By that time, the world had taken notice of the confident young artist’s prodigious talents, with many in the press dubbing her “the next Mozart.” Unwilling to wear that title, and noting that there already was a Mozart, the artist has gone on record stating she would prefer to be recognized for who she is: Alma.
“Vienna is an incredibly inspiring place to grow up, it is really the city of music,” said Deutscher, over the phone from her home in Austria. “When I go to the vineyards with the amazing view of the city to skip around in the nature, or when I’m sitting in the underground, I’m constantly getting ideas. Also, having lived here awhile, I’ve also composed a few Viennese waltzes.”
These waltzes will almost certainly be imbued with the light and feathery touch that characterize the era when the House of Habsburg ruled the region.
Critics writing about Deutscher’s work have lit upon how it is very focused on melody, running counter to many of the atonal and arrhythmic facets of contemporary classical music. This somewhat tiresome argument bred in an academic circles that contemporary music must be ugly and dissonant to reflect these qualities in the world doesn’t impress Alma.
Her lush, symphonic music defies the critics. They certainly can’t accuse her of failing to find inspiration in those same mechanics and technology of everyday life. Her recently composed Siren Sounds Waltz is informed by exactly what modernists say music should embrace.
It just happens to be melodic.
“The Viennese police siren is made in fourths and doesn’t wail like most do in other places, so I decided to make it into a melody,” Deutscher said. “Then I also incorporated specific sounds such as local bus doors closing and other city noise and integrated them into a waltz. It begins very chaotically, with the orchestra playing like a street with horns and sirens, until it calms down and you enter into the imagination.”
That imaginary realm is where the “ugly sounds of the modern world become something that is beautiful.”
Deutscher’s imaginary realm is inseparable from her musical output. She has conceived a land she calls Transylvanian — never having been to Transylvania, she says she has no idea how that name entered her head — which is where she hears beautiful melodies that wind-up in finished works. These are often written by various uniquely-named composers in the land, such as Antonin Yellowsink.
“All the composers in my imaginary country write a little bit differently,” she said. “Antonin is quite a melancholy character who writes sad melodies. Sometimes, when I’m stuck in my compositions and don’t know what to do, I show them to him and he often makes very good suggestions.”
The strong female characters in her operas undergo adventures in Transylvanian too. Deutscher has always loved stories about girls who overcame difficulty through their talents and their determination. Due to this, she populates her works with them.
“It’s what I like, and it is also is a way for me to address how, in the past, there were talented female musicians who were denied the right to compose and have their works performed,” she said. “That really made me rather quite angry. When I write a piece, working hard to develop the melodies into a something that makes senses, with a structure that makes sense; I think of them.”
The more the interview continues, the more it becomes clear why Alma has enchanted everyone from Zubin Mehta to some of the classical music world’s toughest critics and beloved British presenter Stephen Fry.
Her love of music is absolute, and completely impossible to separate from any other facet of her life. This artist was finding ways to note down the melodies that apparently come into her head constantly when she was six years-old and had no formal musical training to speak of. Her ongoing studying has, in large part, been about developing better techniques to transition what she hears to sheet music.
Deutscher went on the record at age 10 stating that she understood how it might be hard for some to take her music seriously because of her years. The 15 year-old on the other end of the line exudes a professional confidence coupled with youthful energy that begs the question: How far can it go?
“I’m always composing, but it’s a very hard and time-consuming process, taking those melodies that are constantly coming and organizing them,” she said. “And for pieces such as the piano concerto I’m doing in Vancouver, which I wrote when I was 12, I am always doing little fixes and changes. I re-orchestrated almost the whole concerti to put in a big brass section, because I’ve always wanted it to have a big crashing section that’s really loud, and never felt that it worked quite right.”
She says that the piano concerto holds a particular place in her heart, because she wrote a good deal of it on her grandmother’s piano after she passed on. She says that it’s one of the saddest things she has written, surprising to people who know what an incredibly happy person she is.
So what does she do besides music?
“I love ballroom dancing, and Vienna is a perfect place for that, and it’s become a serious passion,” she said. “Twice a week, I get to go and learn the most amazing dances, and I’m going to go to lots of balls this coming season with my dresses already picked out. And I also love the theatre.”
Alma Deutscher will play three performances with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra under composer Stanley Dodds.