Music Reviews : Mutter Plays Brahms Sonatas at Pavilion

As unlikely as it seems, there are people who resist the music of Johannes Brahms, and are happy doing so. Those people certainly must have stayed away from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center on Tuesday night, when Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis played the composer’s three sonatas for violin and piano.

The non-attenders missed a lot. The 27-year-old German musician, one of the great violinistic hopes of recent decades, gave these wondrous, ever-cherishable works the full measure of detailed, affectionate attention. There may be other approaches to the musical riches in these 10 movements; Mutter’s on this occasion seemed completely convincing.

As all good Brahmsians will, Mutter concentrated strongly on the lyric content of these pieces, allowing the more sweeping rhetoric to emerge naturally out of musical context. Often, this composer can be relied upon to construct his longer lines out of the fabric of accumulated statement. The violinist, scrupulous about all the smaller events, let the larger ones arise, as Brahms probably intended, without artifice.

Given out of order, with the Sonata No. 2 in A, Opus 100, preceding No. 1 in G, Opus 78, and the D-minor, No. 3, concluding the program, these works exerted all their power and charms in these performances.

Appropriately, the most Romantic, the A-major, was accorded the most restraint--overheated Brahms can be messy. It moved, with Apollonian reserve but warm tone, beautifully and inexorably from the banked fires of the opening movement, through the gentle but climactic Scherzo, and into a cathartic, if understated, finale.

The most intimate, the G-major, reverberated with strong feelings--held-back yet thoroughly expressed. Delicacy and wispiness were here incorporated with aggressiveness and bravura--not the performers’, but the composer’s.

The most dramatic of the three sonatas, Opus 108, concluded the program in the same vein, its bigger moments never slighted, but its inner workings utterly explored and revealed.

Brahms the composer wrote large works, big-boned structures of imposing length and massiveness; his great interpreters realize this size by spotlighting the many, and small, components that bring it alive. Mutter, with Orkis, her admirable partner, did this, and created memorable performances.

Their single encore became a transcription of the composer’s Hungarian Dance No. 5.