This woman has sung Mahler with Boulez, and Brian Wilson with Elvis Costello; she has been a Melisande for Haitinck and a Xerxes for William Christie.
Now Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter has come up with the album her many fans have been clamouring for. While Abba popsicles have
been her favoured encore fare for some time, von Otter's new Deutsche Grammophon album I let the music speak is a full-scale tribute to the songs of Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus.
Unless you were a devout Abba fan in the 70s and 80s, only a few titles will be familiar. Of these, I let the music speak becomes a winding, winsome waltz, The Winner Takes All disarmingly throwaway.
The anthemic Heaven help my heart, from Chess, is delicately floated down to earth on one of the album's many shimmering arrangements, this one making the most of vibes and bass clarinet.
The Swedish songs are less familiar, two being taken from the team's 1995 musical Kristina Fran Duvemala. The second, Ut mot ett hav, with Magnus Lindgren's soprano sax playing Wayne Shorter to Von Otter's Joni Mitchell, is robustly sentimental; a farmhand ponders issues of freedom while watching a brook babbling its way to sea.
If this sounds overly quaint, then von Otter also has her own sense of humour. I am just a girl is downright irresistible, with "gee-whiz" vocals against oom-pah tuba, banjo and clarinet.
If you come to the end of track 11 and feel cheated that your favourite Abba song wasn't included, hang in there. A minute later there's a hidden number - an uproarious take on Money Money Money which comes across like the Swedish answer to If I were a rich man.
This is the arrangement to end all arrangements - uncredited, as it is a secret track. Gypsy, klezmer and even a few Piazzolla sequences bed down with the mottled murmur of marimba and the click of the castanet. And von Otter positively revels in the tune's serpentine twists, closing off an album which just might give cross-over a good name.
* Anne Sofie von Otter I let the music speak (Deutsche Grammophon 477 5901)
