Violinist’s Beethoven Is All Business

Anne-Sophie Mutter is glamorous. And a violinist. But she is not a glamorous violinist. The glamour gets her on stage and off, but it’s not part of her playing.

Wednesday night, for instance, she was all poise and flair as she entered from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s wings in an attention-getting black strapless gown that looked painted on. But once the violin was lifted to her chin, she planted her feet firmly, even a little awkwardly, on the floor. She removed the smile and wrinkled her brow. The 34-year-old German star had come to play Beethoven, and Beethoven for Mutter is all business. Serious business.

This is Mutter’s Beethoven year. Beethoven’s 10 violin sonatas are all she will play these 12 months of 1998. In some 50 cities worldwide, she and her regular pianist, Lambert Orkis, are offering either the three-evening full series or a sampler. Her official biography in the program book calls it “the most important project of her career to date.”

Los Angeles is on the sampler circuit of one-night stands. Wednesday we got the first sonata, the “Spring,” and the “Kreutzer.” But it was more than enough to demonstrate just how impressive a Beethovenian Mutter can be.

In the “Kreutzer,” especially, Mutter could be overwhelming. This is the biggest, boldest, most dramatic of the sonatas, the one Tolstoy wrote a famous short story about. And Mutter almost seemed to play it for Tolstoy, who felt that the sonata was so powerful we needed to earn the right to hear it, that it should be music only for the major moments of our lives.

Mutter’s performance was one of amplification, of making every gesture seem larger than life. She ferociously rushed to passionate climaxes in a wildly dramatic first movement. She probed the variations of the second movement for the intensity of its details. She put on a rapturous bravura display in the brilliant finale. Her playing on a very grand scale tested the limits not only of Beethoven’s music but of her instrument’s expressivity.

Yet the vaunting scope of Mutter’s technique and interpretation were also troubling. The “Kreutzer,” though the ninth of the violin sonatas, is still a relatively early work; Beethoven began his Third Symphony just after. Moreover, it is the only big statement Beethoven made in the violin sonatas. The others all have marvelous things in them (the “Spring,” in particular, is deservedly popular and was an important work for a young composer).

But as a set, this is no equal to Beethoven’s piano sonatas or string quartets, and is hardly a year’s musical diet. Such limited concentration on the violin sonatas can lead to all kinds of ingrown perversions, all kinds of excessive worrying of the finest points. Not surprisingly, Mutter made too much of the two earlier works on the program, and she sounded a little clumsy in the process.

And that brings us back to the violinist’s glamour. The conflict between a glittery appearance and a determination to play only Beethoven in the most single-mindedly dramatic manner possible creates its own tension. Three amusing little Beethoven encores, in fact, told all. Here Mutter attempted to be a bit more engagingly frivolous but, interpretively stiff as a board and still worrying all those details, she failed miserably at it. She even began to lose the crowd she had so dazzled with the “Kreutzer.”

It was ultimately Orkis, an engaging and well-rounded pianist, who was the delight in these happy trivialities. But he brings his own set of problems to the Beethovenian collaboration as well. There is a close communication between Orkis and Mutter; he supports her, and, when the stakes are high, matches her intensity. But the piano is the violin’s equal in this music, and he never interferes with her fireworks, never really shares the limelight. It will be good, next year, when this marvelous violinist finally removes her Beethovenian blinders and, one hopes, lets herself live a little more.