Mutter’s Engaging Move to the 20th Century

In 1998, Anne-Sophie Mutter came to town stuck on Beethoven--that was her year spent playing nothing but the 10 Beethoven violin sonatas. Wednesday night, the fruits of that resolve, in the form of a Beethoven CD set, won Mutter and her partner, pianist Lambert Orkis, a Grammy.

But Mutter has moved on. Now she is on a 20th Century Limited, consigning this season to music of the last hundred years, traveling the world with several modern concertos and a couple of recital programs. Thursday night she and Orkis landed at UCLA, offering one of those recitals in Royce Hall.

Such 20th century tenacity has gotten the photogenic Mutter an extraordinary amount of publicity; glossy photos along with flattering profiles and appreciative reviews are blanketing the international press. The concerto marathons and recitals are easy to admire as the worthy efforts of a popular and supremely accomplished artist actively engaged with the art of her time.

But they may be too easy to admire. Mutter’s program Thursday displayed little that was modern, let alone contemporary. The pieces were mostly written long before Mutter was born and are well-established audience favorites. Each composer--three Russians and one Estonian--has written more challenging, more important violin music. Indeed, most of the program was music adapted for violin rather than written for violin. And while Mutter enjoys presenting herself as a liberated modern woman in her trademark strapless gowns, she is anything but a violinist liberated from 19th century virtuoso affectation.

The version of Arvo Part’s “Fratres,” the evening’s one relatively recent score, had its premiere in 1980 at the Salzburg Festival, where Mutter, then a teenage prodigy of conductor Herbert von Karajan, might well have heard it. But if she did, the performance by Gidon Kremer (to whom the work was dedicated) made little impression.

For Mutter the score that helped make the Estonian composer, and soulful Baltic Minimalism, famous is but another showy violin etude, more an opportunity to honor the sleek sheen of her tone and her notable virtuosity than to enter into the music’s ritualistic mystic purity.

Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 was a curious but not unimaginative partner to Part in the recital’s first half. Part drew some of his pensive tone from the more somber bits of Shostakovich, and the Trio, though Romantically robust, is a memorial work from World War II.

The insertion of chamber music into a recital program was a nice touch as well, and it gave Mutter the chance to show off an impressive young cellist, Daniel Muller-Schott, who has been a beneficiary of the music foundation for young players that Mutter sponsors.

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And yet, for all the serious digging in and drama the players brought to the Trio, it too was a showpiece. Again Mutter’s glassy high notes, her sudden thrusts into climaxes and her penchant for Porsche-quick accelerations all seemed calculated to inspire awe, which of course they did. Nor was it quite in the chamber music spirit that Mutter stood, still center of attention, rather than sitting with her colleagues (it is unlikely that, in her tight gown, she had any choice).

After intermission came Neo-classical music--Stravinsky’s “Suite Italienne” (the arrangement by Samuel Dushkin of music from Stravinsky’s popular Baroque music-inspired ballet, “Pulcinella”) and Prokofiev’s Second Violin Sonata (the composer’s arrangement for violin of his popular sonata for flute). In the Stravinsky, Mutter was brilliant if unseemly. Her interpretive detailing dazzled in its subtlety and control, yet it felt as though the violinist were almost physically dragging the Modernist Stravinsky back into the previous Romantic century.

Prokofiev’s sonata transcription is likable, gracious music but without the weight of his First Violin Sonata. Mutter’s way was to play it as if it did have that weight.

But then the single encore--Ravel’s “Habanera”--received a perfect performance!

Mutter and Orkis (who was his usual discerning but discreet presence all evening) captured something utterly magical in the music’s fleeting sentiment, a magic that had been avoided in the Russian works with an almost studied determination.

Here Mutter finally offered a reminder that she can be a great violinist when she isn’t preoccupied with trying to prove that she is a great violinist.