The performance began with a scream. Or was it a bang, followed by the cry of the wind? In the next half-hour, recorder player Dora Donata Sammer whistled, bleated, cried, crowed, whirred, rattled, purred, hummed, sang, and chirped her way through repertoire from the Baroque to the contemporary, from the Renaissance soprano recorder to the electronics-assisted contrabass recorder. Sammer combined Giorgio Tedde’s “Austro” and Luciano Berio’s “Gesti” with Bach’s A Minor Partita, Fausto Romitelli’s “Seascape” and Jakob von Eyck’s “Fluyten Lusthof,” leaving the listener with a dizzying question: Did she really make all those sounds on the recorder? But Sammer, who is finishing up her master’s at the Mozarteum in Salzburg with Dorothee Oberlinger (and also doing an undergraduate degree in piano at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna) makes it all seem easy. We met on a recent afternoon in a café in Berlin.
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