Playing to Her Heart’s Content

Anne-Sophie Mutter bustles into the lobby of the Hotel Palace already smiling, her hand outstretched 10 steps before it can be clasped. The violinist is back in her home base of Munich after storming New York in January with a marathon survey of 20th century music, in which she performed three programs with the New York Philharmonic--two or three concertos at each outing--and two sonata and chamber music recitals at Carnegie Hall.

It’s the first day of February, but it could be spring, and Mutter is dressed in pink for the occasion, her shoulder-length hair blown straight. On the elevator, she chats in high-speed German to the attendant, asks the reporter how the flight was in near-perfect English, and yells out a solicitous “Hey!” to an unsuspecting toddler who gets on a floor above us.

“The last concert was on the 17th of January,” she says, settling into a suite she’s rented for the interview, “and I haven’t played a note since then--nothing! I should practice, but I just don’t feel like it.”

That sounds a little nervy, considering that she’s about to take much of the same repertory on the road for a monthlong 12-city tour that will include two stops in Southern California, one on the same night as the Grammy Awards, where she’s been nominated twice for her 1998 recording of the 10 Beethoven Violin Sonatas.

She’s adamantly devil-may-care. “You know, the weather is great,” she says. “I’m going with my children to the Italian restaurant, we might go to the zoo. I need that. I know I have to pay for that--oh, God, I have to pay for that. Because if I don’t do it now, I have to work double on the tour. But I don’t care.”

At 36, Mutter is an international star as famous for her hard work and high musicianship as she is for her strapless gowns and well-honed image. Mutter has not slowed down--or burned out--since her debut as a child prodigy at age 13. Today the widowed mother of two young children juggles a demanding concert and recording schedule, extensive foundation and charity efforts and the commissioning of new works--all of which she tends to organize herself.

“I just enjoy it,” she says of the uber-schedule, “as much as I sometimes hate it, you know, working until midnight and feeling rotten. I’m very passionate about whatever I’m doing; I’m there 150%. If you really want to do something the best you possibly can and you enjoy doing it, then it’s unavoidable.”

Unavoidable if you are Mutter, with her passion for grand projects--like the New York City marathon survey or the Beethoven set.

“I like to have an overview, not just be the soloist who can only play one Beethoven concerto and one Tchaikovsky and one Sibelius. It’s just not enough! Life is too short to just recycle the repertoire.”

Despite the logistics of managing her career, Mutter insists that she doesn’t keep close tabs on herself. “Sometimes friends ask me, ‘How many days do you spend outside the home?’ ” she says, drinking hotel coffee and spreading butter and jam on a slice of brown German bread. “I don’t want to know. Last year I did a recording of ‘The Four Seasons,’ although I wasn’t planning it. I like the contradiction of the gypsy side of my life and being extremely well-organized.

“Being able to do something completely unexpected and unplanned gives you the illusion of being free,” she says. “I think we all need some improvisation.”

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In 1998, Mutter spent the year playing the cycle of 10 Beethoven sonatas in a 50-city tour. The subsequent Deutsche Grammophon recording is what earned her the two 1999 Grammy nominations--one for best classical album, the other for best chamber music performance.

(She turned down an invitation to perform at this year’s show: “I don’t think that classical music is either welcome or fitted into a pop frame,” she says, “and I don’t want to cripple great music. I mean, anything you would play is too long, so you fade out of the ‘Spring’ Sonata? I just can’t do it!”)

At the time, she said the Beethoven cycle was the most challenging thing she’d ever done.

“Ja, it’s difficult to speak in Olympic terms all the time,” she says brightly, when reminded of that quote. “It was very challenging, although my [20th century] project in New York was the project I have been fighting for, working for, preparing for the hardest I had ever had to prepare for anything in my entire life.”

Her latest blockbuster undertaking required months of planning, research and rehearsal with her longtime pianist, Virginia-based Lambert Orkis. Mutter calls the project “a very subjective retrospective of a hundred years of 20th century violin music.” It includes a backbreaking range of composers and styles--Sibelius, Ravel, George Crumb, Witold Lutoslawski, Respighi and Berg. The New York Times called her final performance with the New York Philharmonic “a triumph” and said of another: “Go expecting anything you like, and she will find ways to surprise you.” Said New York magazine: “In some ways her most amazing achievement has been winning over concertgoers in New York City. . . . Such independent spirits who can grow up so impressively and bring audiences along with them are always rare.”

“It is such a complex [group of works] that I didn’t know how the pieces would work when put into the programs together,” she says. “It was for me a real struggle to switch from one to the other instantaneously. To play Berg and nothing else is a piece of cake, but it’s a completely different psychological undertaking to take it in combination with the Sibelius violin concerto.”

One of the great challenges of the 20th century program, she explains, was trying to find a way into music she likes to describe as “alien.” “There was just not enough time in this century to absorb it in the genes of our being,” she says. “With Beethoven and Mozart and Haydn it’s so much easier, because we’ve lived longer with it. It takes the audience much longer with contemporary music. But for the player it’s not a piece of cake, either. There’s no piece I could say comes specifically easy,” she says.

“It takes a long time to ingrain them into your system. That’s the ultimate synthesis between the composition and the player. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the hours that you drill it into your system. It has to do with the life you spend with it, and the life you spend between the time in which you know this piece again. Time is a very important factor.”

Mutter has also funneled her energies of late to revive the once-prestigious Carl Flesch competition, which will take place in 2001 in Monte Carlo, for musicians ages 17 to 23. Her Munich-based Circle of Friends Foundation helps a handful of young musical scholars--including a young cellist from Munich, a bass player from Slovenia and a violinist from Beijing--with living expenses, private tutoring and the purchasing of instruments. “We basically do everything we can until one day they have to fly themselves, of course,” Mutter says.

She is active in a number of charities as well. A portion of ticket sales for the 20th century tour will go to Artists Against AIDS, and she has also played benefit concerts for or financially supported Munich’s Pinakothek art museum, a foster care home in Romania, and efforts to fight leukemia, myopathy, muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis.

Mutter doesn’t have a direct answer for the question of why she devotes money and time to such philanthropies. Charity work has always come naturally to her, she says with a shrug. “I don’t know, wouldn’t it be strange not to do it?” she asks, deflecting the question. “Having children makes you so thankful toward life; I mean, two healthy children, what else can you have as a present in life?”

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Mutter was born into a nonmusical family in the Black Forest, and it has been widely reported that she demanded piano lessons at age 5.

“I actually asked for violin lessons,” she corrects, rebutting a thousand database references. “Apparently there were some neighbors’ children who also played violin, and it must have sounded like cats in pain,” she says, laughing, “so my parents decided, no, they’d rather have me play piano.”

Soon, however, she got her hands on a violin. Her first concert came at age 6. It was at the Salzburg Festival in 1977 that Mutter, the phenomenon, really took off, when she played with famed conductor Herbert von Karajan. With Karajan as her mentor, she spent the next decade building her reputation as an international performer, along the way maturing from slightly geeky prodigy to glamour-puss, then weathering critiques about her sexy image and proving her technical mastery of the classic violin repertory.

But in the late 1980s, she began to open up to the possibilities of contemporary music. Mutter credits the late Swiss composer-patron Paul Sacher, an ardent commissioner of 20th century music, with her transformation. “I was kind of dreaming this dream of playing Beethoven and Brahms forever,” she says. “It just didn’t come to mind that I could play a piece by a living composer.”

But Sacher persuaded her to try out a work by Lutoslawski, who later wrote “Chain 2” expressly for her.

“After that, life wasn’t the same, thanks to God,” she says. “It was so exciting to get under the skin of something so alien and so strange and so tempting.”

Mutter followed Sacher’s example and began commissioning herself and since Sacher’s death, in 1999, Mutter says she has increased her commitment to new work. “[I’m] looking around desperately for the next generation of composers,” she says.

She is opinionated about the kind of new music she is looking for. “I like to play pieces that have a structure, a kind of classical shape,” she says, “where there’s a kind of development of an idea, it’s not just a patchwork of nice- sounding or ugly-sounding ideas which are knitted together and they don’t tell anything.

“And the music has to have some spiritual, human quality. Music has to reach you, do something with you. Otherwise, why bother?” she says, scrunching up her voice. “Why bother [to] study it, and why alienate an audience with it?”

Precisely 32 days into the new century, and Mutter is already worrying about her contribution to 21st century music. “I feel like 100 years old, because in the last century there are these few pieces which were either commissioned or written for me,” she says, “but this century nothing has happened so far. My God, I’m already very concerned.”

She isn’t entirely joking. She will perform a new Kristof Penderecki sonata at the end of April, and she’s waiting for other works by composers including Sebastian Currier and Pierre Boulez.

What has she learned about herself from the things people write especially for her?

“As an artist you try to be as complex and as kaleidoscopic as possible,” she says. “Therefore you are never totally surprised. The Penderecki cadenza”--to his Violin Concerto No. 2, dedicated to Mutter--”is so technical, it’s part of my love for difficulty, and also just to show off is part of my personality as a violinist, but it’s not the main part.”

Another example? Mutter says that Wolfgang Rihm was intrigued by the sound quality of the upper register on the 1710 Stradivarius she has been playing for the past 16 years. His “Time Chant” was written specifically for a violinist who has very tiny hands, she says, holding up her right hand, “which gives me a high position on the upper register where every single note is like a hair apart.”

Whatever her devotion to gypsy improvisation, Mutter knows exactly where she’ll be professionally for the next few years.

Upcoming projects include a new recital program of Mozart sonatas, with Orkis, and a trio (cellist Lynn Harrell will join them). These are carefully calibrated programs, but without the major themes of the past two years.

“My next projects have nothing to do with such a large overview, they have to do more with single pieces which fit together very well,” she says.

Not that they are without a hook. One project she’s working on comprises piano trios by Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, which reflect the ambiguous love triangle between them.

“Bringing that into context is great fun,” she says, “because the audience can relate to the human side of these projects. It makes it exciting to see how much music is written because of human relationships--to connect it to human beings and to disconnect it from this aura of being so holy that you are not allowed to have fun.”

Which brings her back to the issue of work versus play. When she is asked about a newspaper story that contains the unlikely-sounding fact that an eight-month sabbatical is planned for later this year, she retorts: “No, six! It’s shrinking by the hour! But I think I am really taking time off. It’s great just to get away from everything and realize there is life outside the concert hall.”

And what part of that life is she going to concentrate on? “God,” she says. “We’ll see what seems to be the most urgent, if I just want to run up a mountain or sit and only read. It probably will show once I’m out of the schedule, what my soul needs the most, what my brain needs: maybe half of it, doing nothing, playing with my kids and eating, drinking, sleeping and God knows what else.”

And then a slight frown rises above her smiling eyes: “Then I have to seriously get back, because there’s lots of repertoire for next year.”

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Anne-Sophie Mutter, Wednesday, 8 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, $25 to $45. (949) 553-2422. And Thursday, 8 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA, $16 to $50. (310) 825-2101.