“In Monday’s (4/13) Wall Street Journal, David Mermelstein writes that at age 51, German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter “stands at the top of her game: technically unflappable, coolly impassioned and stunningly elegant in her strapless Dior gowns. This season finds her at the center of a six-concert ‘Perspectives’ series at Carnegie Hall…. On April 28 with the New World Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, [she performs] concertos by Alban Berg and Norbert Moret…. Few put across the core repertory (Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc.) with the muscular ease and sense of discovery that she does. She is just as persuasive in more modern scores … championing the works of important living composers—among them Henri Dutilleux (who died in 2013), Sofia Gubaidulina and Krzysztof Penderecki…. Ms. Mutter says that for decades she avoided Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s rhapsodic Violin Concerto.… But André Previn … changed her mind. ‘He said I must. And now I love it.’ Another conductor, the Austrian Manfred Honeck, similarly checked her long avoidance of Dvorák’s Violin Concerto…. Their performance of the piece with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in February 2014 proved revelatory…. ‘You need a great conductor for that to succeed,’ Ms. Mutter said.”
Posted April 15, 2015
