Scandale opens with music by Tristano himself, followed by works by Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel. What the latter three pieces have in common is an association with the Ballets Russes and the company’s impresario Sergey Diaghilev – and their place at the heart of musical scandals. Originally for orchestra, they are performed on Scandale in arrangements by their respective composers for piano four hands, sounding every bit as dramatic on the two keyboards as they do in their orchestral versions.
What may come as a surprise is the influence of Detroit and Berlin techno on the Scandale cover image and other photos taken for the album project. Berlin-based photographer Marie Staggat is known for her links with the Detroit electronic music scene: having taken her first portraits of some of its leading figures back in 2010, she published the book 313ONELOVE – A Love Affair With Electronic Music From Detroit in 2016.
She has even closer ties with Berlin’s electronic music community – working on the door at the legendary Tresor Berlin nightclub between 2007 and 2017, she found herself pretty much at the epicentre of the city’s house and techno scene. It was at Tresor that she heard Francesco Tristano play for the first time, as part of the Berlin Atonal festival in 2013. Staggat loved the performance so much that she asked Tristano if she could photograph him for her portfolio. He therefore invited her to come along to a concert he was giving with Alice Sara Ott a few weeks later at a historic indoor swimming pool in Berlin, an event hosted and recorded by cultural TV channel ARTE for its “Musik im Salon” series.
The chemistry between the two young artists and the photographer was there from the start and Staggat took some beautiful portraits of Ott and Tristano that same evening.
She was in the right place at the right time. DG Art director Merle Kersten was immediately convinced she had found the right photographer to work with her on developing a concept for Ott and Tristano’s forthcoming album. They decided on a stark setting, in contrast to the expressive repertoire on the recording. Concrete walls and floors, plain outfits, and zones marked out in improvised style with masking tape created a modern, urban atmosphere that suited Ott and Tristano’s cosmopolitan lifestyles. The resulting pictures both accentuate their individual personalities and capture the special nature of their togetherness, that conspiratorial sense of artistic collusion we also get from the cover image.
Incidentally, one thing Staggat didn’t know when she first met Tristano was that he’d made an album at the studio of Detroit producer Carl Craig. Released in 2010, Idiosynkrasia saw this classically trained musician combine pianistic finesse with house and techno beats. The circle was squared. By the time Scandale was in the planning stages, Tristano had also already released two albums with DG:
As for Alice Sara Ott, she had been an exclusive DG artist since 2010, and had caused a sensation with several solo albums featuring fresh interpretations of core classical repertoire.
And it was in her first year with DG that she first met Tristano, at a Universal Music event in London. In an exclusive interview for this Cover Story, she recalls the early days of a friendship that began over a decade ago, continues to this day and has inspired a series of joint artistic initiatives:
“We instantly connected over our passion for Japanese food and over the following years it sort of became a tradition for us to try to find the best Japanese restaurant whenever we happened to be in the same city. We always said we would love to explore the version for two pianos of Stravinsky‘s Le Sacre du printemps and in 2014 we finally made it happen on Scandale – a duo album and concert programme that we created as an homage to Sergey Diaghilev and the composers at the beginning of the 20th century in Paris, who composed for the Ballets Russes group and revolutionised and shocked the world of music and art.
After the album came out, we toured the programme through 40 cities all over the world – eating Japanese food almost everywhere! – and it was a unique experience to be on stage with two pianos only, recreating a symphonic world with these pieces that are normally played by orchestras with around 100 instruments.
Our Scandale tour finished in the end of 2015 and Francesco remains a very close friend of mine, one whom I admire both as a human and as one of the most brilliant and versatile musicians of our time. It was very special for me when he agreed to write the opening piece for my album Echoes Of Life.”
