Customer Reviews

Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Romances

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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.

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.

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.

Unlike the rave by the first reviewer and the pans by the next two reviewers, I found things to like and others to bemoan about this performance. It won't replace other favorite recordings such as Menuhin/Furtwängler, Hahn/Zinman, Heifetz/Munch (all available at amazon.com), but it is, in my opinion, better than Perlman/Giulini, which pits Perlman's juicy romanticism against Giulini's drier analytical approach. There is no question that Mutter and Masur are more than a little underpowered in the first movement (although the Kreisler cadenza is humdinger as played by Mutter) but there are subtleties, too. The attention to line and its organic growth in the early moments of the concerto is an example but this gets lost about ten minutes into the movement when it begins to lose its focus. The second movement is serenely played and for me that's just fine. In the last movement things really cut loose and it's a delight; Mutter makes the umpteen repetitions of the rondo theme slightly different each time around. I also liked the second of the Romances a lot.

So I guess I come down somewhere in between the previous reviewers. This would not be my choice for an only recording, but I'm glad I own it.

I am perplexed by some of the previous reviews. The concerted dislike of ASM's performance was almost visceral. Admittedly, I am nowhere as technical as the authors of those critics, but I was so moved by her performance that just went out and bought a bunch of her RECENT recordings.

Yes, her interpretion of this great masterpiece departs early and far from orthodoxy. I understand some of the uneasiness people must have felt. But people should understand the difference between artistic improvision and Hollywood style showmanship. Beethvon was a helplessly romantic soul trapped in a classic frame (dare I say bohemian? Afterall, how many composer would have melodized bodily sounds into a symphony?). Had he been living today, God knows how he would have composed or played his works?

IMHO, what ASM did was liberating, she projected a heavenly piece of music to a landscape our mortals live in. For that, I am grateful.

From the opening subdued timpani notes to the final glorious romp, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and the New York Philharmonic directed by Kurt Masur give us a thoroughly convincing performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. Called "the greatest young musical talent since the young Menuhin" by conductor Herbert von Karajan, Mutter has become one of the preeminent performers of our time. Although twentieth-century music is her specialty, Mutter is equally at home with the great Romantic and Classical music. This CD groups the Beethoven Violin Concerto with his two lesser-known Romances for Violin and Orchestra. Predating the larger work, these Romances have the character of the inner, slow movement of the concerto; introspective and melodic rather than bombastic virtuoso display. Lovely as these works are, especially the second Romance, it is surely Mutter's performance of the Concerto that is the selling point of the disc.

Beethoven above all composers balanced the various musical parameters--relying not solely on melody and harmony, but also exploiting the drama of rhythm, spacing, texture and dynamics. Mutter's work in contemporary music has given her a special sensitivity to these techniques that serves her well here. In particular, her use of timbre and delicate awareness of timing is enviable, as she subtlety varies her sound according to the music's dramatic goal. Performing on a Stradivarius violin, Mutter carefully balances aggressive stridency, transcendent darkness, and crystalline lyric soaring. How anyone could imagine that Mutter is incapable of performing with a light touch, as one of the previous reviewers has commented, is inconceivable to me. Mutter is surely aware of the particular challenges of the piece--in the liner notes an interviewer specifically comments "though it isn't a virtuoso concerto, many violinists consider it perhaps the most difficult one in the entire literature", to which Mutter replies, "Yes, that's right" and then continues at length about those difficulties.

I do have one serious disagreement with one of Mutter's claims in her notes, that "Beethoven always had trouble writing a beautiful melody." (This in response to the question, "How do you feel about the melodies of the first movement") Nonsense, pure and simple, albeit often repeated nonsense, probably first uttered by Leonard Bernstein. It is certainly documented fact (from his remaining notebooks) that Beethoven worked on certain ideas at great length--the opening of the first string quartet occurs in embryonic form in a notebook predating that quartet by ten years. Some melodies have a certain naivety, such as the Ode to Joy theme--but considering the multiple counterpoints set to it, such simplicity is inevitable. Further supposed evidence for the argument is that the nature of certain first movements are scarcely melodic at all, most notably that of the Fifth Symphony. How could a composer incapable of writing a beautiful melody compose the theme of the SECOND movement of the Fifth Symphony, or the Third Symphony, for that matter? Or the Pathetique Piano Sonata, first and second movements? To think that Beethoven wrote this way because he could not write a decent melody is not only to ignore the evidence, but also to totally misunderstand the technique involved and the greater artistic vision. For Beethoven, a first movement was often more motivic rather than melodic--the difference being that a motive is the shortest recognizable musically meaningful statement (often only two or three notes), and a melody or theme is considerably longer. A theme may or may not contain motivic writing; but motives, to be effective, must be introduced at the beginning of a piece. Imagine the beginning of the Fifth Symphony if it were instead the second movement, and a long, melodic movement had preceded it--the result would be an artistic disaster. It is not that Beethoven could not write such a tune, he could and often did; it is that he did not always feel that such themes were appropriate to his opening rhetoric.

Nonetheless, Mutter performs superbly, and Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic are her equal partners. They support Mutter's artistic vision completely. Very highly recommended.

Mutter's 1997 recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the same backup cast as this one immediately jumped to the top of my all-time favorite performances of that masterpiece. Such tone. Such technique. Such passion!

It was with eager anticipation, then, that I ordered her latest recording of the Beethoven concerto. What a disappointment.

I won't repeat in detail all that has already been said about the mannered playing, the scratchy tone in the pianissimo passages, etc. The thing that struck me almost immediately was the tempi. This performance plods along like Mussorgsky's Polish oxcart in "Pictures from an Exhibition." A quick comparison with the Heifetz/Munch/BSO recording shows that Mutter takes almost 6 minutes longer to play the first movement alone. Six minutes!! That's huge. (The other two movements are each about 2 minutes slower in the newer recording.) Even if the playing were perfect (which it isn't) and reflected the same passion as the aforementioned Brahms (which it doesn't), this performance never really comes to life. It's simply boring.

I'm afraid this CD is destined to gather dust on the shelf in favor of the Heifetz.

Anne-Sophie Mutter gives a dazzling, commanding performance of Beethoven's violin concerto which easily reminds me of Wolfgang Schneiderhan's spellbinding, lyrical performance with Eugen Jochum conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Hers is a performance that is both warm and sensual, replete with technical brilliance as she tackes Kreisler's demanding cadenza in the first and third movements. Yet it is a performance that never misses the lyrical qualities of Beethoven's score. She is blessed in having Kurt Masur lead the New York Philharmonic in one of his final performances as the orchestra's music director. Masur's conducting truly is a valedictory statement as to where he has lead this great American orchestra musically over the past decade, playing with as much warmth and understanding for Beethoven's score as their counterparts in Berlin and Vienna. The sound quality is first rate, due to the sterling effort of Deutsche Grammophon's recording team; it is unquestionably the best recent live recording I've heard of the New York Philharmonic. The record quality is the same as you'd expect from a studio recording. Without question, Deutsche Grammophon has done a splendid job producing one of its finest concert recordings in recent years.

This concerto is one of my favorite pieces of music, so I was very much looking forward to hearing this recording. Alas, I was disappointed.

In the interview accompanying the CD, Ms Mutter notes that this concerto is not a "virtuoso" composition, and thus she selected the Kreisler cadenzas in order to lend a more virtuoso character to her rendition of the piece. This was a mistake: the weakest part of the recording is the first movement, in which the hardest parts, which I assume are the cadenzas, sound scratchy. Indeed, she sounds as though her violin has laryngitis.

Overall, Ms Mutter ignores what Beethoven wanted and plays with a heavy hand. Certainly parts of the concerto call for loud and vigorous playing, but uniformly to play the concerto that way does violence to the intent of the composer. Parts of the concerto should be played with a light touch, something of which Ms Mutter seems incapable, at least in this piece.

A disappointing outing. This concerto, probably the greatest violin concerto ever written, deserves a soloist who focuses on Beethoven, and not on whether the piece is sufficiently difficult to warrant serious attention. It is more than difficult enough--in fact, it is just right.

Mutter's playing in the first movement is nearly enough to make one stop listening to the rest. "Finniky" and riven with "mannerisms" is one way to put it. Another would be that she simply ignores what Beethoven said as to how this should be played. Her work in the latter movements improves to between quite good and excellent. The Amazon review observation that the result is unmoving is right on.