Anne Sophie Mutter, Berliner Philharmoniker, Manfred Honeck Dvorak: Violin Concerto, Romance, Mazurek (2013) (repost)

Anne-Sophie Mutter performs all of Mozart's mature Violin Sonatas in these films from Munich's Gasteig concert hall. "… vital, dynamic playing with a wide range of colours … a real sense of the music's melancholy and intellectual depths … from the great violinist" (Süddeutsche Zeitung). "Such was the ease of Mutter's and Orkis's dispatch of every opening movement that the oasis at the heart of each sonata became a place of real refreshment" (The Times).

This DVD visualizes Anne-Sophie Mutter's successful 2010 Brahms album (with Lambert Orkis), her first Deutsche Grammophon recording of this essential repertoire - and first time ever on DVD. “Never before have Mutter and Orkis seemed so joined at the hip, giving and taking, conducting dialogue, chasing each others’ thoughts. (The Times).

The Claudio Abbado recording of the Dvorak New World Symphony has managed to secure itself a place among the top digital versions of this much-recorded work, alongside the Dresden performance of James Levine, also on DG. Taken from live performances in 1997, it shows every sign of spontaniety without any loss of dramatic bite or xxcitement. Abbado makes full use of his theatrical background to bring about this effect both in the symphony and in the welcome, perfectly-chosen fill-up, and elicits peerless and attentively-detailed playing from the Berliners.

Anne-Sophie Mutter is joined in by André Previn and cellist Daniel Müller-Schott for these performances of the finest of Mozart's Piano Trios, filmed in Mantua's magnificent 18th-century Teatro Bibiena. "The outstanding musicians making music in an affectionate and elegant way" (International Record Review). "Mutter's warm tone and her subtle gradations of vibrato are a constant pleasure" (BBC Music Magazine).

In the notes for this release, pianist Krystian Zimerman has distinctly unkind things to say about his 1983 recording of Brahms' First Concerto, complaining first about the weak piano and then about the muffled recording. About the eccentric conductor the incredibly slow Leonard Bernstein the idiomatic orchestra the unbelievably beautiful Vienna Philharmonic or his own sub par playing uncharacteristically heavy and unbearably ponderous Zimerman is understandably silent. The great speaks for itself and the less said of the less than great, the better.

An inspiring, authoritative, chronological overview of one of the defining label-orchestra relationships, documenting 100 years of recording between two giants in music, the Berliner Philharmoniker and Deutsche Grammophon, from 1913 to 2013.