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.