Intellectual

beautiful, talented, clever, a wonderful gift from heaven

Yes, Mr! “She is the most photogenic of players: young, pretty, bare-footed; and, with her long dark hair and exquisite strapless dress of dazzling white, not only seemed to imply that sexuality itself can make you a profound musician, but was a perfect visual complement to the sleek monochrome of a concert grand... [but] there’s more to her than meets the eye.” ALEXANDER BOOT Author, critic, polemicist Blogs > Alexander's blog > Submitted by Alexander on 24 June 2013 - 12:59pm The other day I listened to something or other on KZfaq, and a link to Chopin’s Fourth Ballade performed by the Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili came up. The link was accompanied by a close-up publicity photo of the musician: sloe bedroom eyes, sensual semi-open lips suggesting a delight that’s still illegal in Alabama, naked shoulders hinting at the similarly nude rest of her body regrettably out of shot… Let me see where my wife is… Good, she isn’t looking over my shoulder, so I can admit to you that the picture got me excited in ways one doesn’t normally associate with Chopin’s Fourth Ballade or for that matter any other classical composition this side of Wagner or perhaps Ravel’s Bolero. Searching for a more traditional musical rapture I clicked on the actual clip and alas found it anticlimactic, as it were. Khatia’s playing, though competent, is as undeniably so-what as her voluptuous figure undeniably isn’t. (Yes, I know the photograph I mentioned doesn’t show much of her figure apart from the luscious shoulders but, the prurient side of my nature piqued, I did a bit of a web crawl.) Just for the hell of it I looked at the publicity shots of other currently active female musicians, such as Yuja Wang, Joanna MacGregor, Nicola Bendetti, Alison Balsom (nicknamed ‘crumpet with a trumpet’, her promos more often suggest ‘a strumpet with a trumpet’ instead), Anne-Sophie Mutter and a few others. They didn’t disappoint the Peeping Tom lurking under my aging surface. Just about all the photographs showed the ladies in various stages of undress, in bed, lying in suggestive poses on top of the piano, playing in frocks (if any) open to the coccyx in the back and/or to the navel up front. This is one thing these musicians have in common. The other is that none of them is all that good at her day job and some, such as Wang, are truly awful. Yet this doesn’t really matter either to them or to the public or, most important, to those who form the public tastes by writing about music and musicians. Thus, for example, a tabloid pundit expressing his heartfelt regret that Nicola Benedetti “won’t be posing for the lads’ mags anytime soon. Pity, because she looks fit as a fiddle…” Geddit? She’s a violinist, which is to say fiddler - well, you do get it. “But Nicola doesn’t always take the bonniest photo,” continues the writer, “she’s beaky in pics sometimes, which is weird because in the flesh she’s an absolute knock-out. “The classical musician is wearing skinny jeans which show off her long legs. She’s also busty with a washboard flat tummy, tottering around 5ft 10in in her Dune platform wedges.” How well does she play the violin though? No one cares. Not even critics writing for our broadsheets, who don’t mind talking about musicians in terms normally reserved for pole dancers. Thus for instance runs a review of a piano recital at Queen Elizabeth Hall, one of London’s top concert venues: “She is the most photogenic of players: young, pretty, bare-footed; and, with her long dark hair and exquisite strapless dress of dazzling white, not only seemed to imply that sexuality itself can make you a profound musician, but was a perfect visual complement to the sleek monochrome of a concert grand... [but] there’s more to her than meets the eye.” The male reader is clearly expected to get a stiffie trying to imagine what that might be. To help his imagination along, the piece is accompanied by a photo of the young lady in question reclining on her instrument in a pre-coital position with an unmistakable ‘come and get it’ expression on her face. The ‘monochrome’ piano is actually bright-red, a colour usually found not in concert halls but in dens of iniquity. Nowhere does the review mention the fact obvious to anyone with any taste for musical performance: the girl is so bad that she should indeed be playing in a brothel, rather than on the concert platform. Can you, in the wildest flight of fancy, imagine a reviewer talking in such terms about sublime women artists of the past, such as Myra Hess, Maria Yudina, Maria Grinberg, Clara Haskil, Marcelle Meyer, Marguerite Long, Kathleen Ferrier? Can you see any of them allowing themselves to be photographed in the style of “lads’ mags”? I can’t, which raises the inevitable question: what exactly has changed in the last say 70 years? The short answer is, just about everything. Concert organisers and impresarios, who used to be in the business because they loved music first and wanted to make a living second, now care about nothing but money. Critics, who used to have discernment and taste, now have nothing but greed and lust for popularity. The public… well, don’t get me started on that. The circle is vicious: because tasteless ignoramuses use every available medium to build up musical nonentities, nonentities is all we get. And because the musical nonentities have no artistic qualities to write about, the writing nonentities have to concentrate on the more jutting attractions, using a vocabulary typically found in “lads’ mags”. The adage “sex sells” used to be applied first to B-movies, then to B-novels, and now to real music. From “sex sells” it’s but a short distance to “only sex sells”. This distance has already been travelled - and we are all being sold short. Alexander's blog

Hi CULTURE express&Jennifer! THE INDEPENDET (**) Michael Church ...The hall was full - vigorous marketing, plus her trademark bare feet and scarlet ball-dress, had seen to that - but the performance itself was miserably charisma-free.

The Telegraph 29 Mar. 2015 By Anna van Praagh ..."Alice Sara Ott gets a lot of attention for her looks and her quirks - but it is her unique musical personality that will keep her at the top ... She looks like a supermodel, often takes the stage in a ball gown and bare feet and, she tells me, has a great fondness for neat scotch. ... “The world of classical music is a very hard world and the people who survive are just a few. One minute you are very popular, four years later no one has heard of you. It could all be over tomorrow. That’s what I want to avoid. I want to be around in 20 or 30 years, doing what I love, I don’t want to be a shooting star.” ... With her elfin features, porcelain skin and jet black hair, she is breathtakingly beautiful, and not averse to posing for photo-shoots highlighting that beauty. Does she feel under pressure as a female artist to exploit her sex appeal? ... “I know where my limits are,” she says crisply. “If I do a photo-shoot I must feel comfortable. I know what I will do and I know what I won’t do.” ... She believes that the classical music world is far more egalitarian than it once was. ... Are her love of whisky (she favours Talisker, Laphroaig and Lagavulin ), her habit of warming up her hands before a concert by solving the Rubik’s cube (she can complete it within a minute), and her trademark bare feet simply ways of making sure she stands out in a crowded market? No, nothing so calculated she says. ... “There’s no commercial reason for performing in bare feet. It makes me comfortable and it gets hot under the spotlight so it’s nice to feel the cold pedals on my feet.” ... The Rubik’s cube is practical and the whisky - well, she just happens to like single malts. ... However, such quirks do help make her more - dread word - “accessible” to audiences that might not normally be attracted to classical music and that is something about which she is passionate. ... “I want to remove the notion that classical music is just something for rich educated people,” she says. “It’s not. You don’t have to be educated to enjoy classical music, you get educated by listening to it.” ... “That’s why for me it is so important to be a really good musician rather than someone who just looks good on stage,” she muses, “Because then I am replaceable. If I have a unique musical personality, I hope that people will wait for me.” GIDON KREMER : ...die Tage der "verwegenen Burschen und wunderschönen Mädchen", die das Publikum verführen, sind gezählt. Sie werden schon bald abgelöst werden von ... ihresgleichen! Ein in der Öffentlichkeit zum "Superstar" promovierter Künstler verleiht der vorgetragenen Musik keine zusätzlichen Feinheiten.Sein Name, dekliniert, konjugiert, geschätzt, verkauft, gefeiert, zu Lebzeiten lautstark bejubelt, wird ...in VERGESSENHEIT geraten. ...."In der heutigen Zeit der Massenaufläufe und Vergnügungen wird es als besonders "cool" betrachtet, sich nach dem populären Geschmack zu richten. ...Indessen verführt man uns dazu, die Treue zur Musik zu vergessen und uns im Namen des Erfolges (oder Umsatzes?) "hinzugeben" (das Wort entspricht sogar der Handlung!) - Hauptsache, der "Kunde" (der Hörer!) ist zufrieden. Erinnert so eine Haltung nicht an ein Bordell? ..."

Hey Fritz. You're a pathetic KZfaq troll. A cut and paste stalker.

Mr. Cancan, in my modest opinion, A. S. Ott is a brilliant pianist and his comments are pretentious and pathetic. You bring nothing interesting.

Mr. Clasico! Yes, Mr! “She is the most photogenic of players: young, pretty, bare-footed; and, with her long dark hair and exquisite strapless dress of dazzling white, not only seemed to imply that sexuality itself can make you a profound musician, but was a perfect visual complement to the sleek monochrome of a concert grand... [but] there’s more to her than meets the eye.” ALEXANDER BOOT Author, critic, polemicist Blogs > Alexander's blog > Submitted by Alexander on 24 June 2013 - 12:59pm The other day I listened to something or other on KZfaq, and a link to Chopin’s Fourth Ballade performed by the Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili came up. The link was accompanied by a close-up publicity photo of the musician: sloe bedroom eyes, sensual semi-open lips suggesting a delight that’s still illegal in Alabama, naked shoulders hinting at the similarly nude rest of her body regrettably out of shot… Let me see where my wife is… Good, she isn’t looking over my shoulder, so I can admit to you that the picture got me excited in ways one doesn’t normally associate with Chopin’s Fourth Ballade or for that matter any other classical composition this side of Wagner or perhaps Ravel’s Bolero. Searching for a more traditional musical rapture I clicked on the actual clip and alas found it anticlimactic, as it were. Khatia’s playing, though competent, is as undeniably so-what as her voluptuous figure undeniably isn’t. (Yes, I know the photograph I mentioned doesn’t show much of her figure apart from the luscious shoulders but, the prurient side of my nature piqued, I did a bit of a web crawl.) Just for the hell of it I looked at the publicity shots of other currently active female musicians, such as Yuja Wang, Joanna MacGregor, Nicola Bendetti, Alison Balsom (nicknamed ‘crumpet with a trumpet’, her promos more often suggest ‘a strumpet with a trumpet’ instead), Anne-Sophie Mutter and a few others. They didn’t disappoint the Peeping Tom lurking under my aging surface. Just about all the photographs showed the ladies in various stages of undress, in bed, lying in suggestive poses on top of the piano, playing in frocks (if any) open to the coccyx in the back and/or to the navel up front. This is one thing these musicians have in common. The other is that none of them is all that good at her day job and some, such as Wang, are truly awful. Yet this doesn’t really matter either to them or to the public or, most important, to those who form the public tastes by writing about music and musicians. Thus, for example, a tabloid pundit expressing his heartfelt regret that Nicola Benedetti “won’t be posing for the lads’ mags anytime soon. Pity, because she looks fit as a fiddle…” Geddit? She’s a violinist, which is to say fiddler - well, you do get it. “But Nicola doesn’t always take the bonniest photo,” continues the writer, “she’s beaky in pics sometimes, which is weird because in the flesh she’s an absolute knock-out. “The classical musician is wearing skinny jeans which show off her long legs. She’s also busty with a washboard flat tummy, tottering around 5ft 10in in her Dune platform wedges.” How well does she play the violin though? No one cares. Not even critics writing for our broadsheets, who don’t mind talking about musicians in terms normally reserved for pole dancers. Thus for instance runs a review of a piano recital at Queen Elizabeth Hall, one of London’s top concert venues: “She is the most photogenic of players: young, pretty, bare-footed; and, with her long dark hair and exquisite strapless dress of dazzling white, not only seemed to imply that sexuality itself can make you a profound musician, but was a perfect visual complement to the sleek monochrome of a concert grand... [but] there’s more to her than meets the eye.” The male reader is clearly expected to get a stiffie trying to imagine what that might be. To help his imagination along, the piece is accompanied by a photo of the young lady in question reclining on her instrument in a pre-coital position with an unmistakable ‘come and get it’ expression on her face. The ‘monochrome’ piano is actually bright-red, a colour usually found not in concert halls but in dens of iniquity. Nowhere does the review mention the fact obvious to anyone with any taste for musical performance: the girl is so bad that she should indeed be playing in a brothel, rather than on the concert platform. Can you, in the wildest flight of fancy, imagine a reviewer talking in such terms about sublime women artists of the past, such as Myra Hess, Maria Yudina, Maria Grinberg, Clara Haskil, Marcelle Meyer, Marguerite Long, Kathleen Ferrier? Can you see any of them allowing themselves to be photographed in the style of “lads’ mags”? I can’t, which raises the inevitable question: what exactly has changed in the last say 70 years? The short answer is, just about everything. Concert organisers and impresarios, who used to be in the business because they loved music first and wanted to make a living second, now care about nothing but money. Critics, who used to have discernment and taste, now have nothing but greed and lust for popularity. The public… well, don’t get me started on that. The circle is vicious: because tasteless ignoramuses use every available medium to build up musical nonentities, nonentities is all we get. And because the musical nonentities have no artistic qualities to write about, the writing nonentities have to concentrate on the more jutting attractions, using a vocabulary typically found in “lads’ mags”. The adage “sex sells” used to be applied first to B-movies, then to B-novels, and now to real music. From “sex sells” it’s but a short distance to “only sex sells”. This distance has already been travelled - and we are all being sold short. Alexander's blog

in Japanese too as she said 音楽

Waduh, napsu nih...

Most Germans speak very good English, and always in an American accent..Helene Fischer would be another perfect example of a German speaking American English. When I was last in Germany, I never heard a local speak in an English accent.

japanese girls are much cuter which is alice sara ott...

Actually she's German. Her father is German. She was born and brought up in Germany. Her foramal and music education were in Germany. She is multi-lingual and really talented. Her mother is Japanese. "Cute" is patronising, don't you think?

+pvandck yeah she is german....but i can see her japanese in her appearance too....japanese girls are very very cute and pretty....

It is a piano piece by Grieg...

Alice is no slouch tho!

Jennifer Hsuing of CCTV

Alice Sara Ott - PR product, money making machine! Der weltberühmte Geiger Gidon Kremer schreibt in einem neuen Buch ,,Briefe an eine junge Pianistin": ...,,Kaum zu glauben: Es gibt im Handel mit Musikern erstaunliche Begriffe wie ,,das neue französische/ englische/ deutsche Talent", ,,new face of the next generation" oder einfach ,,rising star" usw. Heute schrieb mir ein Kollege von einer jungen Begabung, die man der Welt gleichzeitig als Model und Geigerin ,,in einem Flacon" anbietet. Egal ob es sich um Pianisten oder Geiger handelt, das riecht stark nach Kosmetikprodukten. Da erhebt sich die Frage: Wollen wir bei diesem Wettbewerb mitmachen? ...Warum bemühen sich viele Künstler, besonders vorteilhaft auszusehen? Woher kommt deise Krankheit? Liegt es an unserer Zeit? Am demokratisierten Geschmack und in der Folge am Diktat des Marktes? Sind Künstler,die sich auf diesen Ausverkauf einlassen, total unschuldig? Ich habe da meine Zweifel...Auf diesem Markt ist nämlich viel Falschgeld im Umlauf. ..."

Sara Ott is prettier & can play the piano.

.marc Andre Hamelin

You got your numbers right but in the wrong order... Franz Liszt wasn't 1. 85 m. tall; he was 1.58 m. short.

You are only 1/2 right. The same thing if you say “European women are prettiest women on earth”. You should say “Eurasian women are the prettiest women on Earth”

there are pretty women of all races. it is ridiculous to claim one is prettiest. You can just say in my opinion.

German is her nationality, since she was born in Munich, but her mother is japanese and her father is german, so I guess it would more technical to call her "german-japanese", but the order isn't that important.

T T if she was born in Germany whoever parents are she is German , I can't understand why they put title German Japanese ??????

@@uelrington9270 exactly, Alice should be described as German or Japanese German. The way this video is titled its backwards. But Alice does look more Japanese than German, so perhaps the reason for the title. But she certainly does not look full Japanese...and she is absolutely Beautiful.

@@mjjm6220 She does not look like German at all, i can't consider her as Half German.

Rockyourassed how a person looks has nothing to do with their nationality. Her nationality is in fact German, half her blood is German. And to me, I can see she is not full Japanese. Just like my 2 grandkids are not full Japanese.