Customer Reviews

Simply Anne-Sophie

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Anne Sophie is among my favorite violinists and she is nothing but excellent throughout this whole cd. But the recordings are pulled from previous releases. The Carmen sequence suffers badly from the recording and contains the identical flaws that the original release did on her previous Carmen Fantasy cd. As an introduction to ASM I recommend it. Her playing is as great as ever. But you will not find anything new here and the recordings are less than stellar.

This is my favorite CD by Anne-Sophie Mutter. I hope you'll have the pleasure of listening to it.

Simply Anne-Sophie would be more aptly named, Gorgeous Excerpts of Anne-Sophie's Best Recordings. Five segments are five minutes or less. The longest section clocks in at 12 and a half minutes.

I thought the selections were well chosen to present a wide range of her abilities and musical subjects. How many recordings do you own that contain on a single CD part of The Four Seasons, two Mozart violin concertos, Beethoven's romance number two for violin and piano, Meditation from Thais, Brahms' Hungarian Dance number six, George Gershwin's Summertime, and Pablo de Sarasate's Fantaisie de concert sur des motifs de Carmen?

The order of the selections is interesting. Ms. Mutter begins as close to classical roots as her style ever does, then slows down into expressive pieces, and ends with rousing energy and joie de vivre.

As a result, I often play this CD as a mood piece to inspire me during a difficult task. By the end, I'm filled with enthusiasm, energy, and a sense of unlimited confidence. Those are all good feelings to have as a writer sits down to face a blank computer screen.

The other advantage of this work is that you can sample her styles to see if you might be interested in buying a CD that provides more in that style. From my perspective, I thought that only the excerpt from The Four Seasons is misleading about the joys that the full CDs offer. For me, the first allegro from Spring is by far the best part of her Four Seasons CD; the rest is not nearly so enjoyable.

The reviewer that complained that,"... there is nothing new here" missed the point of the disk. This was not one more performance of Bethoven or Mozart, it was instead a collection of her performances that form a first rate listening experience.

While I realize that there are many music lovers that do not want to hear a piece unless it is played from beginning to end, there are others of us who enjoy listening to the artist's picks of what she believes that you would enjoy (and perhaps recordings that please her). While I own most, if not all these performances, this disk is a valued addition to my collection. I enjoyed listening to it as I wrote this review and plan to enjoy listening to it again as I drive to Jacksonville tomorrow.

If you enjoy music well played rather than a full performance of a piece (where some movements may not be 'up to snuff), then this CD is for you. It is a question of whether you want to hear great compositions in the whole as their composers wrote them or listening the parts that make them truly great performed by an artist with incredible skills. Neither choice is wrong.

Typical excellent work by a uniquely gifted artist. Not for the person who wants whole concertos, but a nice selection of favorites.