A Delicate Balance

Few singers move through musical genres and eras with as much confidence as Anna Prohaska. Programs like “Maria Mater Meretrix” (designed with Patricia Kopatchinskaja) and her latest album, “Celebration of Life in Death” (recorded with baroque orchestra La Folia and Robin Peter Müller), combine everything from Hildegard von Bingen to George Crumb to Leonard Cohen in one evening. Yet they never sound arbitrary, artificial, or pretentious. Instead, they remain credible, conceptually coherent, and demonstrative of Prohaska’s love of language. 

I met Prohaska on a Monday evening last autumn at Weinverein Rote Insel, a wine bar in Berlin’s Schöneberg neighborhood, where she lives. She arrived by bike and immediately started to gush about a concert she’d seen two days earlier given by the Berlin Philharmonic and John Williams, which she attended dressed as Princess Leia—or, “more like an Esther Perbandt version of Princess Leia. I was one of two people dressed up. At first, I thought I’d be embarrassed, but everyone seemed into it.”