Louise Alder
“ If you know the music as if you were an actor – the stresses and the meaning in the words – you can’t go wrong ”
Louise Alder has no doubt how best to prepare a song. It is crucial, she says, to say it aloud to yourself before you touch the music. ‘I always start speaking through my texts, no matter what I’m doing,’ Alder says, ‘no matter if it’s a long coloratura section, or if it’s a wordy Schubert song. If I’ve spoken it as me, or as the character, I know then that I’ve started.’
We’re not talking not about Schubert, however, or Strauss lieder, but of a recording she’s made with the pianist Joseph Middleton devoted to French song. And that takes us straight to the voice itself, because of the special demands the language makes.
With a new album of French romantic song and a turn, the British soprano is making the most of lockdown, she tells
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