Sara Strippoli

For her tenth Deutsche Grammophon release, pianist Alice Sara Ott returns to the music of Frédéric Chopin. She approaches Chopin’s 24 Préludes op. 28 from a fresh perspective, finding a personal thread that parallels the music’s dramatic arc and wide-ranging moods. The pianist frames the Préludes within a contemporary context by interspersing them with seven works by 20th- and 21st-century composers.

“I started onstage when I was four years old in cover bands with my brothers, so I've been waiting my entire career for the right time to do a covers record,” Sara Evans tells Apple Music. More than two decades into her recording career, recognizing that both her interest in brightly lit country-pop singles and her chance at radio success have faded, she’s gotten back to her roots her way. Over the course of 13 tracks, Evans reinterprets vintage crowd-pleasers, many of them plucked from a plushly orchestrated era of ’70s and ’80s pop rock like Fleetwood Mac and the Pretenders, with a couple of more recent pop tunes and country classics thrown in. “I just wanted to flex my muscles and show people what I can do,” she says. “There's so many sides to me and so much to my personality other than just people thinking I'm just a straight country singer.” She made the new album a family affair by featuring the vocal and instrumental talents of her own progeny, and enlisted a co-producer, Jarrad Kritzstein, from outside her circle because she was taken with how he blended subtle eccentricities, moody warmth, and finesse on Ruston Kelly’s 2018 breakthrough Dying Star.

One of the few great things about lockdown for me was the opportunity to discover and share some wonderful solo violin music, both old and new, via YouTube. In a time when I couldn't work with other musicians or play to live audiences, I felt I could still connect and relate to you, my virtual audience, through music.

A violonist, she won a first prize with distinction at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Lyon in 2003, with R.Dugareil, then A.Roussin as masters. She later attended advanced violin classes at the Rotterdams Conservatorium under the guidance of J.J. Kantorow, then a series of chamber music classes at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris with E.Bellocq, J.J. Kantorow and R.Dyedns.