Customer Reviews

Alban Berg: Violin Concerto "To the Memory of an Angel" (1935) / Wolfgang Rihm: "Time Chant" Music for Violin & Orchestra (1991-92) - Anne-Sophie Mutter

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I admit to having been dubious about Anne-Sophie Mutter. There have been so many crossover fiddle-babes lately, that I had subconsciously filed her alongside Vanessa Mae and Linda Brava. That was unfair, probably sexist, and ill-considered, as this disc makes clear.

Mutter is the real thing. She displays an extraordinary command of her instrument in what is really an very difficult and technically demanding piece.

The Berg Violin Concerto is magical. At times jagged and strident and at times soaring and lyrical, it demands exceptional range from the soloist. Although it is [mainly] atonal, the concerto is capable of expressing great warmth and melodic invention in the right hands. Mutter's hands are the right hands.

I hesitate to use another sexist term like "a woman's touch," but the truth is that there is something ineffably feminine in Mutter's performance here. Perhaps it's a lyricism that I don't here in Stern's performance of the same piece. Perhaps it's a lightness of touch. In any event, Mutter proves herself by seeming to start from the position that she has nothing to prove.

I had never listened to Wolfgang Rihm's music before, and Gesungene Zeit remains the only composition of his that I have ever heard. I was quite dubious at first, having been disappointed in the past by neo-conservative "modern" composers like Gorecki and Part. However, I was pleasantly surprised by Rihm's composition on this disc.

It may be just that Mutter plays the solo part so well, of course. But Gesungene Zeit has sort of griwn on me. It is minimal [rather than minimalist] in the same way as Ives' Unanswered Question, with some srong tutti chords in the second half. I'm not sure I would class it as one of the GREAT concetante violin pieces, but it does have a charm -- certainly as performed by Mutter -- that seems to improve with each listen.

I've held off on reviewing this Deutsche Grammophon disc for a long time, since I didn't think I could add anything to the praise already lavished on it by the press and my fellow reviewers. Yet, it is the fate of reviewers to ultimately throw in their two cents in spite of all that has come before, so here follow my thoughts on these performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by James Levine, with Anne-Sophie Mutter on solo violin.

Alban Berg's "Violin Concerto" (1935), with the dedication "to the memory of an angel", seems to have finally entered the standard repertoire. Written after the death of the young Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler-Werfel and Walter Gropius, it is a work of constant elegy sometimes tempered with praise of a beautiful young soul, but at other times giving in to the darkest feelings of mourning and catastrophe. Like in all his work, Berg uses the twelve-tone system inherited from his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, but with strong echoes of traditional harmony. Romanticism is abundant in this work too often considered undesirably "modernist"; it opens with the lushest sounds of clarinet and harp, moves towards the softest touches of strings, and ultimately roars thundering crescendos pregnant with meaning. While the violin is sometimes a sort of protagonist, representing the bloom of youth held down by Fate, often the work is intensely directing us to higher themes outside of the ensemble itself.

Since Berg left the door open to traditional harmony, he brings in two objets trouvees that link the work to a long tradition before it. The most readily noticeable is Bach's chorale "Es ist genug", variations on which provide the basis of the second movement. Another is a Carinthian folk song Berg knew in his youth, when he had an illegitimate child with a family maid, giving the concerto a "secret programme". This being 2007, when film music has gone to much greater extremes of "dissonance" than Berg ever approached, the harmonies of the concerto will seem pleasing and elegant to all but the most conservative of classical listeners.

There are, of course, many other performances of Berg's concerto out there. But several things set this apart. For one, the digital sound quality is superb, bringing a clarity to a piece too often heard in primitive recordings. And it was recorded after examination of the original sketches in the 1980s revealed that a key part of the work was muddled in the published score. Finally, there is Mutter's technique itself. While she has now grown rather stale and trite, at this time the violinist was at the height of her powers, and this performance is simple flawless.

The second piece on the disc is Wolfgang Rihm's "Time Chant" (1991-92). Here the violin is meant to exhibit nearly vocal characteristics, and when the small orchestra contributes, it is only in the role of filling out a line that is, as Rihm, claims, "in essence monophonic". The writing for the violin hovers in the heights of its range, playing crystalline sounds in the longest durations. This is actually something unusual for Rihm, as his music is often concerned with movement and energy--see JAGDEN UND FORMEN in DG's "20/21" series for an excellent work in this vein. Here Rihm amost approaches Alexander Knaifel in the light purity of the writing. I enjoy it immensely, especially played on a top-of-the-line stereo where its fragile beauty shines through, but I'd certainly recommend that people look elsewhere for an introduction to Rihm.

This disc is one of the greatest achievements on the CD. It commands so much respect and demand that 15 years after its release, it still has not been lowered to mid-price. It deserves a place in your collection, and the music will undoubtedly find itself a place in your heart as well.

Alban Berg (1885 -- 1935) composed his violin concerto as a requiem for a young woman, Manon Gropius, but the work effectively became Berg's own requiem as well. It is Berg's last completed score, written in 1935. This is passionate, emotive music which staddles the bounds between atonality and musical romanticism. The performance by Anne-Sophie Mutter and James Levine conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, recorded in 1992,is justly celebrated. This is an ideal introduction to Berg and to his masterful violin concerto. This is difficult music, make no mistake. The new listerner should stay with it, as the violin concerto will reward many hearings.

I used the discussion of this work in Michael Steinberg's book, "The Concerto," (1998) as a guide to my listening. Steinberg writes with great enthusiasm for Berg's concerto and gives the reader a good, brief introduction to Berg and his work. The violin concerto is a hermetic work. That is, the concerto is filled with allusions to Berg's love life, to affairs both late in his life and to an affair he had as a young man. The work also shows Berg's fascination with secrecy and with numerology. He followed certain pseudo-science of his day in thinking that the number 23 had some mystical significance for the life-rhythm while the number 28 had significance for women. This thinking, and other beliefs in lucky numbers and the like are built into Berg's score.

But of the music were only a code to be deciphered, it would not be of much interest. The emotion and force of the violin concerto drew me in and will make the work live for other listeners as well. The work is in two movements, each of which has two parts. The first movement opens slowly and elegaically with a quiet figure in the harp, followed shortly by an ascending 12-tone figure for the violin. The second part of the music is more rapid in tempo and develops nostagically an old folk-song -- in Berg's case, perhaps, to remind him of a love affair he had when young, the memory of which remained with him through life.

The second movement opens with a violently dissonant passage that speaks of calamity and loss. The second part of the movement, though, is a response and an answer to deep sorrow. It develops a chorale theme from a Bach cantata, "Es ist Genug" through a combination of Bach's harmonies and Berg's own. The chorale goes through a number of variations and moods ranging from a rememberance of love and passion to quiet acceptance and resignation. The work fades away with only the solo violin remaining at the end. The solo and the orchestral writing are deeply intertwined in this concerto.

It may be a shame that Wolfgang Rihm's "Time Chant: Music for Violin and Orchestra" is the companion piece on this CD. It seemed to me a thoughtful work, but it pales in comparison with the Berg. Rihm is a prolific contemporary German composer, and he wrote this work for Anne-Sophie Mutter. This was my first exposure to his music. The "Time Chant" is in two movements, both of which feature the violin playing declamatory passages at the top of its register punctuated on occasion by orchestral outbursts. The work shimmers and has the quality of a chant but functions mostly as a showpiece for Ms. Mutter's formidable technique. There are some striking passages for the violin but they are surrounded by musical moments in which not much happens.

The Mutter-Levine reading of Berg's concerto is more than enough reason to hear this CD with Rihm's work an intriguing addition. This disk offers an outstanding opportunity to get to know one of the great masterpieces of Twentieth Century music.

Robin Friedman

I have long put off writing this review because I was afraid my puny words could not match this recording, which is one of the very finest in my collection of 3,000+ classical CDs. I have about a dozen recordings of this work, as it's my favorite violin concerto (sorry, Beethoven), but this reading is in a league of its own: the only comparable recording is the famous Krasner/Webern, which was only the second performance of the work ever. (The work was written for Krasner...see post script.)

Mutter and Levine are both on a very, very high level here, and the consistency is astonishing as well. Levine never holds back--the fortissimo climaxes in the second movement that represent the physical agony of 18-year-old Manon Gropius are truly hair-raising. (Some conductors perform this with more head than heart, but this is very emotional music and the emotional content should not be downplayed.) As someone else pointed out, Mutter give less vibrato than most in the Corinthian folksong, but the result is haunting, and here she was not abusing this technique, as I feel she now often does. Mutter was far more emotional and connected more with her audience, to my ears, in 1992 than she does today. I would not be interested in hearing what she does with this work now, sad to say, because I think she would turn it more into a vehicle for her technique than an exploration of the work.

But in 1992 Mutter was not yet "Anne Sophie Mutter," and instead she uses her magnificent control over the colors of her violin to imply the evolution of Manon's life, consciousness and illness. Although the grief is already present when we begin, there are also many light and airy moments in the first movement that make the grief feel more like freshadowing. In the second movement the illness is already fully present, and we hear what can only be the wracking pain of the illness. Her violin thus sounds, if not weak, at least subdued and drained when the Bach Chorale enters. But the most astonishing effect is saved for last: as the final bars play, the Corinthian theme is heard again, seemingly as Manon's last statement, and Mutter somehow gives her tone here an eerie "disembodied" quality, as though Manon is departing from this earth. It's not the colorless vibratoless approach that she overuses nowadays, but something very special. I must go back and check my Krasner recording to see if he did it. Then Levine brings the orchestra in for the fattest, warmest chords of all as we feel Manon has ended her suffering.

I am aware that we now know this masterpiece has multiple interpretations, and Berg apparently had more than one woman in mind when he wrote the work (the concerto is filled with various numerical mysticisms), but at the same time, we don't know who those other women were or what the rest of the "program" was, so I have a feeling Mutter and Levine took the Gropius story as their reference point, as one has to pick something as a focus. Agreed the trombones can't do that glissando from Bb to Eb in the second movement properly, but I am so wrapped up in the music that I just don't care!

Through all this there is an effortless quality that I have never heard in any other recording of this concerto, save possibly the Krasner. (It's hard to tell--the sound is very poor in spots.) Not a gesture is wasted; there is no loss of momentum, not even for a second. Mutter and Levine know exactly where they are going, and the result is one of the greatest orchestral recordings in the catalog, both a sonic tour-de-force and a tender elegy, a modernist work and a deeply Romantic piece filled with the echoes of 19th century Europe. The breadth they achieve is surpassed only by how they manage to unify it all. The Berg is so overwhelming a work that each time I put it on, I am in no mood to play the Rihm that comes after it, as it would have to be anticlimactic, and so I have to confess I have never listened it. Someday I must evaluate that work separately.

(Post script: I've recently found out that Louis Krasner, a couple of years ago in the New York Times, praised this recording as one of the very best. So if you don't believe me, take *his* word for it!)

Sometimes it takes going to a live performance of a work that is familiar to you on recording to make you revisit an old friend with renewed passion. So it was after hearing the astonishingly fine young violinist Jennifer Frautschi collaborate with Pierre Boulez and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Berg Viloin Concerto that I returned to this brilliant recording of the Berg with Anne-Sophie Mutter, James Levine, and the Chicago Symphony to revive those moments. And once again this recording seems definitive. Berg's Requiem work is knowingly and lovingly performed with a richness of tone and technique that erases all of the seeming hurdles of atonal writing and delivers a wrenchingly passionate farewell work. The other joy of this particular recording is the coupling of Wolfgang Rihm's "Time Chant" which he wrote for violinist Mutter. This lyrically transcendent piece is evocative of the best of Messian and more than any other violin work to my knowledge succeeds in creating the illusion that the violin is a human voice, singing over a murmuring, pensive orchestral obbligato. Mutter masters this and the result is hair-raisingly beautiful. This is a very solid and very beautiful recording - and one that even the most harsh critic of atonal and contemporary music will succomb to in time.

Anne-Sophie Mutter is one of the world's leading violinists, and this transcendent performance of the haunting Berg Violin Concerto shows why. With a gorgeous tone, she is in total command of the score's many expressive details, while keeping an eye on the larger structure. The overall impression is of quiet intimacy, even when the piece erupts into more blazing outbursts. The Rihm "Time Chant," written for Mutter, creates a vivid sound world and is also a fascinating complement to the Berg. Rihm is one of the most interesting composers around, and this piece, also on the quiet side, is an excellent introduction to his work.

James Levine is outstanding with Berg, as his glowing performances of "Wozzeck" and "Lulu" have shown. In his hands, this basically atonal score sounds more related to Richard Strauss or even Brahms. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra plays with its typically high level of virtuosity (such pianissimos!) and the recording is clear and natural-sounding.

The Berg is fairly well-represented on CD, and while I also like Itzhak Perlman's version with Ozawa and the Boston Symphony, Mutter's is equally memorable and the Chicago recording has a slight edge over the other one. If you are at all curious about the Rihm, this is well worth looking at.

Out of the many recordings I have come across that exposed me to the Berg concerto, I would certainly say that this is the most passionate while being the most accurate at the same time. The concerto, by its very instrumentation, seems to call for a sombreness in color and performance. This recording is faithful to it. Yet, it succeds even more by exhibiting a very large range of emotions. I have never heard the second half of the first movement played with so much energy. Unlike most recordings, this recording actually gives the listener a sense of "forte" unlike the other recordings' overly sombre mezzo-forte's. I had to look at the score to see if they were playing this piece accurately because there were parts that in which I thought that the wrong line was being emphasised. But according to the score, all of the "haupstimmen" and "niebenstimmen" were correct (even in the section in the last movement where the contra-basses and harp play the theme in a canon displaced by fifth and one measure. I would have liked the harp louder, but oh well.)

Two teenie complaints. Frau Mutter seemed a bit too fond of the non-vibrato sound where the score didn't call for it, and in my opinion, neither did the music. Specifically, in the second half of the second movement in which the violin arpegiates "Est ist genugh" twice and in the same movement, when the Corinthian folk song is quoted - she doesn't vibrato on these notes giving the piece an errie quality that i dont think the piece calls for.

And the complaint which I have for all recordings, why can't the first trombonist get an instrument with an Eb valve???? I am sure that he or she could even get an Eb switcheroonie-thing to swith their F-attatchment. Then they can do the glissando from Bb to Eb in the second movement properly!

The Berg recording is better, by far, than the Perlman/Ozawa disc which was the best I had heard up to now. I was amazed at the emotional depth this violinist brought to this concerto, which is a masterpiece of the highest inspiration. I was literally about to come off the edge of my chair listening for the first time to this performance. This is definitely the "one to have". But it is only for the Berg. Sadly, the Rihm pieces written especially for Ms. Mutter are not the transcendant experience of the concerto.

If only Berg would have lived a bit longer to hear his most beautiful creation performed. Berg composed this work in 1935 and it takes its main inspiration from the unfortunate death of Alma Mahler's daughter due to polio (Berg was devastated when he learned of this news). Berg was commissioned to write this concerto from violinist Louis Krasner who premiered the work under Hermann Scherchen in 1936 not long after Berg's death.

The music of this concerto is quite interesting as I have never heard such an ingenius combination of 12-tone writing with tonal undercurrents. Berg has been described as the most accessible of "The Second Viennese School," which included his teacher and 12-tone pioneer Arnold Schoenberg and composer Anton Webern. I think the reason Berg is more accessible is because he combined the innovations of the 12-tone method with Romantic expression and lyricism. All of Berg's works are marked by this kind of "tug-of-war" between Schoenberg's Modernism and Mahlerian Romanticism and expression. I think that even though Schoenberg was the pioneer of this method of composition and composed some really innovative music that Berg was the better composer. This, of course, is purely subjective.

This recording of Berg's "Violin Concerto" has been hailed by critics and fans alike. Anne-Sophie Mutter turns in one of her most remarkable performances I think. She is completely committed to Berg's vision and translates the pain and anguish he felt during this time. James Levine also turns in a remarkable performance. His accompaniment is responsive, emotional, dedicated, and passionate. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra are simply outstanding and play wonderfully. The audio quality is also top-notch.

The other work on this recording titled "Time Chant" composed by Wolfgang Rihm for Mutter is of less interest to me. After hearing the Berg, this work seems oddly out-of-place. Another work by Berg would have been more appropriate like his "Three Pieces For Orchestra" or his "Lulu Suite."

Anyway, this is really an ear-opening recording and those interested in Berg's work should start here. Highly recommended.

If you're really enchanted with this concerto, then get this 8-CD Berg collection as it will be all one truly needs:

Alban Berg Collection, Deutsche Grammophon, 8-CDs

Alban Berg: Violin Concerto "To the Memory of an Angel" (1935) / Wolfgang Rihm: "Time Chant" Music for Violin & Orchestra (1991-92) - Anne-Sophie Mutter is a 1992 Deutsche Grammophon recording starring violinist Ann-Sophie Mutter. James Levine leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Wolfgang Rihm has written the music notes. This sound is very modern and feels more like noise rather then music. Not recommended. 2/5.