JAMES STRECKER: Please tell us what you want the public to know about your work in the arts. For instance, how do you yourself describe it as a significant experience in your life and why exactly do you labour to make it exist?
BA: On a different life path, I grew up in a family which was musical, my mother played the guitar, we sang a lot, and then I was a chorister. Afterwards, I wasn’t sure if I should become a singer. Therefore, I worked in a bank and studied business before moving to London in 2010. Music has always been an important part of my life, a love, and it hasn’t been always my profession. And it was just wonderful to experience how music shaped my entire life and became more and more significant. That’s something I love with the arts, or with music generally, and it can happen whether you become a professional musician or not. But music is something that doesn’t let you go. And this is a significant experience for me, and a realization which makes my daily life better. Listening to music or making music when I feel ill or sick, it just transforms me as a human being, it makes me happier. And that’s for me really something which is so significant and makes my existence better, my life better. And it’s the most wonderful thing I think that art, music, can do and does with me personally.
JS: What exactly do you like about the work you create, as originator or as interpreter, or as both if such is the case?
BA: Well, I’m not an originator, I’m an interpreter, and it’s interesting to be a medium for people of music of the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st century I perform. Like a painter, I paint every night, the song in a different way. When you think of a painting of Venice, for example, there exist many. Every painter paints the scene a different colour, paints the sky in a different colour. And we, every day, depending on our experiences we had throughout the day, shape it differently, and that’s what I like, it’s not in stone what we do. Every day we have a chance to create it in a different way, with the same piece of music, with the same text. And that I find very fulfilling.
JS: Please give us a brief autobiography, some stuff about yourself that is relevant to the essence of your work in the arts.
BA: As I said before, coming from a chorister, studying business, working in a bank, becoming a musician, this is not a straight way forward but it is essential to who I am today. I started later than anyone else with singing, which I am now grateful for it. I think very often that particularly male singers start too early. You need certain experience in life, not just vocal maturity, but also intellectually. It’s a tough job, you have to be prepared, and that’s something why I’m very happy about it. And that I had this loop, that I really experienced something else, but made the step that music had to be the centre of my life.
JS: In what ways is your creative work fairly easy to do and in what ways is it difficult to realize? Why is it so?
BA: I think there’s not so much fairly easy with our job, apart from after finding a personal connection with the music and how to present it and communicate it with people. If you’re yourself and you try to find a good emotional connection and the way how to communicate it, then it can be fairly easy. Generally, it’s quite a difficult job. We carry our instrument 24 hours inside of us, and we can’t, like a pianist, leave the instrument at home for two hours in the evening and go to the pub. And that’s something we have to live with regarding our instrument, we have to accept it when it’s not working one day, we have to be kind to it. And that is quite a difficult thing to reflect and think about, but not become too self-centered and think only about ourselves – yes, that’s something very challenging and we have to cope with it.
JS: How does doing the kind of work you do in the arts change you as a person – and as a creator?
BA: It changes us very much. Again, in this reflecting process, we have to be open, we have to find inspiration and that’s something, of course, that has a huge influence on ourselves. We change our daily routine, we have to be careful with our voice, we can’t have the wildest life before performances, and so on. And the curiosity as an artist that we have to have influences us very much. The way of reflecting about ourselves, that we try to become better and better, is also something which changes us. I think, of course, the art and the voice are so dominant in our life, and really leading our lives, that we have to follow the music and the voice as a person with our life.
JS: What kind of audience does your work in the arts interest? What new audience are you also seeking? Why to both questions?
BA: The field of Art Song is a bubble within the classical music world, which is a bubble in itself. So, I am very much aware that we will never have huge audiences or huge crowds and millions of people listening to us, but that is also fine to accept. I think that, generally, elderly people who have more time in their lives, who don’t have to worry about small kids, or making a lot of money in their jobs, or have to learn a lot in schools, and so on, they have more the luxury of time. And when you do some recitals, you have to focus fully on the music and the text. It’s not something which you can listen to on playlists next to a fancy dinner. It really requires full attention. And that’s challenging in the 21st century in a very “short living” time when everything’s very hectic. So that’s a reason why I think particularly people listening to song cycles are very often are in the second half of their lives.
I’m trying with my own program to go into schools and bring this Art Song into schools and make kids curious about this music. It’s very important to plant the love I feel for this music into the hearts or into the ears of these young people so that at least they have the first encounter and see that people are passionate about it.
JS: What are the most important parts of yourself that you put into your work in the arts?
BA: It’s the emotional impact, we connect to these songs. In song recitals, you don’t have a stage director telling you what to do, it’s all your own work, it’s your own life experiences you put emotionally into these songs and communicate with an audience. So, of course, these are big parts of ourselves, we reveal our inner life on stage. On top of that it’s personal programs that you put together, concept albums about your life, about your life experiences. It’s a very personal signature on recorded albums and, for example, I created one about home and about belonging. Also with program notes, with contemporary compositions, working together with the composer, choosing the text. So, we shape the music history of our time within the centuries of music history through our commissions, through the work we sing. I think that’s very important that we never forget that we are a part of music history which is still going on and will go on in the future.
JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person in the arts?
BA: Finding inspiration. We give so much on stage and every evening try to give what we can that we actually have to fulfil our inner inspirations – go to museums, watch in the underground how people walk, and think ‘This is a character in this song.’ Having a wonderful time with other inspiring people, listening to their stories, being curious, having every pore of your body open so we find inspiration again for a new way of interpreting songs. Asking questions why we do it this way, this tempo, why do we take time here, why is this word important for us. So that we actually create and never just deliver.
JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life that brought you to this point as a creative person in the arts.
BA: I think it was really coming to London in 2010 from a small place in Bavaria and finding inspiration in all these museums, musical theatre, plays. All of that really shaped me as an artist, and the friends I found here. That was really a turning point where I was also certain I would become a musician for sure and not go back to banking.
JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about your life as a person in the arts?
BA: I think it’s the life living out of a suitcase. In the last few years, I stayed maybe 20-30 days a year at my home, in my own bed. I spend most of the time on the road or in hotels, a life which I could have never imagined when I was in banking. I had a very easy life living with my girlfriend, together cooking every evening, watching TV. It’s a completely different setup now, which is hard, but has also on the other hand wonderful experiences, and you meet very interesting people. But from outside, I think, it’s such a strange life and people struggle to imagine living it.
JS: Please tell us what you haven’t attempted as yet that you would like to do in the arts.
BA: There’s so many ideas, interesting places to perform. I would love to perform song recitals for example like Schubert’s “Winter Journey” in the Arctic. Pushing boundaries with other art forms, collaborations. I have so many ideas in my mind that it’s overwhelming, I have to write them down. First of all, not to forget them, but also to focus my mind on one idea. So, it’s still a source of many ideas coming out. I would just love to go in different directions, work with different people.
JS: If you could re-live your life in the arts, how would you change it and why?
BA: There is nothing major I would like to change. Of course, there are small decisions which maybe were wrong or should have been done differently, but there is really nothing major I would do differently.
JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s culture, including the forms in which you work. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?
BA: I think it’s wonderful that there are so many young people interested in studying singing or classical music. In colleges there are so many applications, like never before, so that’s something very positive. I find the lack of interest in politics and people in arts quite worrying. There are so many studies around the world which show the impact of music on human brains, on kids, how it makes them better human beings with better social skills, but also they learn other subjects faster, like languages, and so on. There is only good, and I find it strange that no politicians really see the huge impact and how important it is. We have to plant music and art into the brains and hearts of young people. And even if they don’t like it in the beginning, I think it’s important that they have the chance to encounter it so that when they get older and listen to classical music they feel familiar with it. If they don’t get the chance from the very beginning, it’s very hard later on to really understand this world which is so important in shaping for everyone. That’s something I feel very passionate about.
JS: What exactly has the impact of the COVID pandemic been on your creative work and your life in the arts?
BA: I have to say that before COVID I was travelling around massively and it was somehow also very healthy having this reset. Before that there was always this part of being annoyed by small, unimportant things like hotel breakfasts and sitting at an airport waiting for an airplane. And having this massive break where everything stands still, when you have a chance again to look into music, to create, to ask big questions like why do you do this job, or if there is something else you should do? I see it looking back as a gift somehow, to have this objective perspective, one step back, and look at your life and overlook everything. And therefore it changes a lot as I had time to look into new repertoire, to think of new collaborations, to talk to people about ideas, and therefore every one of us had the chance in this past two and a half years to make the best of it, to use this time wisely, and to actually take your life again into your own hands and see what you’ll do with it, and therefore I’m grateful.
JS: How has the pandemic changed you as a person?
BA: I think it changed me as a person to not take things for granted, to be grateful for the opportunities, for the relationships, for the private lives, for moments of calmness, for not accepting everything immediately and really stand up if things are not the way you think they should be.
JS: What’s next in the coming few years of your life in the arts?
BA: It’s definitely exploring new directions, new collaborations, working with dancers, with painters, with visual artists. Just probing the horizon, being curious, not thinking in boxes but outside my box, and appreciating other people and their work and their love.