Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Romances [Live]

Ludwig van Beethoven (Composer), Kurt Masur (Conductor), New York Philharmonic (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: New York Philharmonic
• Conductor: Kurt Masur
• Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven
• Audio CD (October 8, 2002)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Live
• Label: Deutsche Grammophon
• ASIN: B00005OC0G
• Also Available in: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #110,489 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

MUTTER / MASUR / NEW YORK P. O. BEETHOVEN: VIOLIN CONCERTO / ROMANCES

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Comparing the Two Beethoven Recordings by Mutter, March 11, 2003

By 

Ming-Yeung Lu (San Francisco Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Romances (Audio CD)

I first became an admirer of Anne Sophie Mutter with her first recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto--done when she was 16, with von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic--so it is with both excitement and trepidation that I put the CD of this new recording on. Trepidation because for a few years now, Mutter's playing has become very affected. While to the artist herself this "more dramatic" style reflects her newly found freedom and spontaneity in musical expression, to some of her listeners the rubato and quirky phrasings just strike our ears as mannerisms.

A first listening calmed my fears somewhat. There are a few stunningly beautiful passages that show Mutter's ability to create sounds that cut into your soul. But the mannerisms are there. Rubato occurs all too often, to the point that this listener feels a little "out-of-breath" when towed along by her erratic tempos. Notes are unexpectedly stressed. Sharp contrasts are also found in the dynamics, with a languid, hollow-sounding pianissimo passage followed by a gruff outpour of forte playing. No doubt Mutter is trying to create "colors" in the music.

After listening to the new recording a couple of times, I went back to playing the CD of the 1979 recording. The earlier recording with von Karajan is violin playing in the grand style. Tones are full, vibratos are full-throttled, whole bows are generously used. Yes, it is a very controlled kind of playing. But the solidity and expressiveness of such playing can dwarf other more wiry styles. This solid style of early Mutter was well-suited to the Beethoven Concerto because it brought out the stately elegance of the piece and, in particular, the "stillness" of the second movement. It was amazing that the then 16-year old prodigy could deliver a performance that was so bold and unsentimental. What Mutter achieved was a beauty that was restrained, aristocratic, and, at times, transcendent. The Beethoven Concerto is known for being ramblingly melody-less; it's essentially made up of a series of arpeggios. The young Mutter made this "rambling" captivating. The most striking passages in the 1979 recording were the ones in which, after a seamless dialogue with the orchestra, she took an inward turn as if she was singing to herself.

Yes, the control in that earlier performance could get to you after awhile, and in retrospect one suspects that much of the control and stately grandeur might have a lot to do with the conductor, von Karajan, and his authority, his control. In an interview included in the liner notes of the current CD, Mutter pays tribute to the conductor's mentorship. She talks about how von Karajan decided when she was "ready" for Beethoven and how they worked on the piece together, but her tribute also makes you think whether the young Mutter, brilliant as she was, was playing the good pupil and whether the older Mutter is now signaling that she is her own person. She is determined to show her individuality.

If the earlier recording lacked coloring or emotional nuances, Mutter is so determined to add colors to her playing these days that--to this listener at least--she's overdoing it, and I'm not sure she is making the music more emotionally compelling. A comparison of how one aspect of Mutter's playing has evolved is helpful here, for it shows what's been sacrificed for the sake of coloring. If there was one thing that I absolutely loved about the early Mutter, it was her pianissimo. Nobody could do a pianissimo like Mutter's. Usually a violinist achieves pianissimo by applying less strength to the bow. But the effect is often a drop in intensity, whereas the music is calling for MORE intensity when it becomes quieter. In a large part thanks to her Carl Flesch training, which advocates for the use of less bow to create pianissimo instead of less strength, Mutter was able to create the effect of increasing intensity while losing volume (the word "volume" is both revealing and misleading, for it reveals that we usually associate loudness with strength, and softness with softness, whereas what Mutter did was precisely the opposite: she decreased the "volume" but maintained the volume, the "muscle" of the sound). I notice that in the new Beethoven recording, those same inward-looking passages that call for an intense pianissimo have become flimsy; instead of applying a soft but strong, aria-singing voice, Mutter is making a hollow sound created almost without vibrato. This may create more qualitative contrast between the soft passages and the loud ones (and hence more "colors"), but it totally destroys the intensity that makes the music emotionally gripping.

I hope that Mutter's exaggerated, mannered playing these days marks only a transitional period, during which she has to stroll as far away as she can from her "good student" days in order to find her "personality." Hopefully, with her considerable skills Mutter will in time find an individual yet balanced style that both reflects the taste of a mature artist and communicates the vision of the composer. Indeed, alongside our desire to see more personality on the part of performers, our very view of how music of the Classical period should be played is evolving as well. Back in 1970, the music critic Harold Schonberg already talked about how Beethoven should be played with more rubato. He referred to the eyewitness accounts by Anton Schindler, a pupil of Beethoven, who described that during a performance of the slow movement in the Second Symphony, the composer made multiple tempo changes within 20 bars! Perhaps, if nothing else, Mutter's erratic take on the Violin Concerto helps to broaden our view of how Beethoven music can be played. We don't mind being jolted a little from our listening habits, only listening to Mutter playing now feels like a roller-coaster ride.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Sadly disapponting, July 3, 2009

By 

Jim Lent (Jersey USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Romances (Audio CD)

I had commented here on Mutter's version of the Beethoven with Karajan and said I couldn't wait for her new take on it. I had loved the slow movement of the HVK Beethoven but thought the first movement was a little straightforward, stolid and slow. I blamed Karajan's domination of a 16 year old. I tried to convince people Mutter's conception of this piece would undoubtedly be different nowadays.
I had said all that after being dazzled by her extraordinary live Brahms concerto of a few years ago with Masur conducting.
And so here the new version is, with Masur, again, conducting. And, well, I was wrong. The new version is different, certainly, but all that's changed seems to be how many mannerisms she can spill all over the same basic dullish interpretation of the first movement.
It's very pretty in its way - beautiful tone - but there's really no reason for this version to exist except to help catalouge the evolution of Mutter's pushing and pulling at the musical line over the years.
The second and third movements are not that much different in style from the Karajan either, except that Karajan is a much more individual conductor than Masur, which works for me. Others may prefer Masur's less Romantic style.
I'm a huge fan of Mutter. I've seen her in concert several times and love what she does with certain kinds of music. I don't even mind mannered playing if it's poetic. For example, she has a pure Mutterism in which, in certain extremely soft passages, she can go from an utterly beautiful tone to a barely audible scrape that gives me goosebumps every time I hear it.
In the Beethoven the mannerisms do nothing to add to the music. If you want Mutter's Beethoven, buy the Karajan. The Larghetto is about the most beautiful I know. But there are many other violinists with better versions of the whole concerto.

16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars * * 1/2 - Playing the violin but not the concerto, March 24, 2003

By 

John Grabowski (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Romances (Audio CD)

I think the cover of this CD is kind of ironic--ASM peearing at us from behind the tinted glass of a limo. That's kind of how this disc with Kurt Mazur comes across, unfortunately. In an interview several years ago for French TV, Mutter said her performance of the Beethoven concerto in the famous Karajan recording has nothing to do with how she would approach the work today. She's right. She is without doubt in my mind the greatest violin virtuoso today. But she is not letting her technique *serve* the music the way she used to. As so many other reviewers have noted, she constantly varies phrasing, pitch, and dynamics in a seemingly arbitrary way that seems to cut against the grain of the music. She can make the violin do incredible things, but I think at the expense sometimes of the composer's intentions, as though she were either trying to recompose the piece (or at least the trajectory of the piece) or at least give us a "cubist" approach--deconstructing the solo part, dividing phrases and handling the divided parts separately, playing the second eight notes of a sixteen note phrase staccato while it had started out legato, for a simplistic example. This has also come across in her DVD of the Beethoven Violin Sonatas (though I still found things here to like), her Brahms concerto with Masur, her Debussy recital with Orkis, and many other recent discs. Along with the fanatical tone colorings and eccentric attacks, she seems to be letting her tone grow harsher and "steelier." Like Pierre Boulez lately, she may be over-thinking the music, and letting it get away from her. Or is it merely showboating, as Dan Davis suggests? Hard to imagine as earnest (perhaps too earnest?) a musicians as ASM showboating, but who knows? Whatever the reason, let's hope her marriage to Previn tempers her playing a little bit. This disc is not to be recommended, unfortunately, unless you are an ASM completist or groupie.