Anne-Sophie Mutter’s first Bach recording for DG couples his Concertos BWV 1041 and BWV 1042 with the world-premiere recording of the Concerto commissioned by her from Sofia Gubaidulina, the Russian composer who regards Bach as her greatest source of inspiration. Mutter gave the premiere performance of Gubaidulina’s Concerto at the 2007 Lucerne Festival and will record the work with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev at the beginning of 2008.
Ms. Mutter makes the violin sing in this fine collection of violin concertos recorded with the Berlin Philharmonic. Ms. Mutter was discovered by Herbert von Karajan at age 13, declared by him as "the greatest musical prodigy since the young Menuhin" and played with the Berlin Philharmonic as a teenager. The two Mozart concertos were recorded when she was only 15. The other concertos were recorded before she was twenty years old. My favorite is the Mendelssohn concerto. Ms. Mutter plays its haunting theme with elegance,flair and fire. Her passion and precision are evident through the difficult passages. Married to conductor Andre Previn, who wrote a violin concerto for her, Ms. Mutter never fails to intrigue her audience, making her vioin sing with colorful, soulful voices.
Anne-Sophie Mutter has always been a superlative violinist with an imposing sound and technique that command attention. As she has progressed her career she has shown a growing reluctance to restrain her interpretations, and this 2008 Mendelssohn recording is evidence that as she progresses in her now-mature career she is becoming more and more assertive in that direction.
The violin is Penderecki’s own instrument (he studied it during his youth), it can therefore be argued that he has a special relationship with the instrument, perhaps it was this relationship that was the spark of inspiration that led to him writing the Concerto after he and Anne-Sophie Mutter performed the Violin Concerto No. 1 of Prokofiev together in 1988, with the resulting Concerto described as creating an “impression of a vast labyrinth” in the booklet notes.
John Williams In Vienna’ featuring the legendary composer’s debut concert with the Vienna Philharmonic will be released in August 2020.
Veteran violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is not performing the usual Beethoven or Mozart repertoire here, but branching out to embrace new music commissioned for her. Along for the ride are the excellent New York Philharmonic under the baton of Michael Francis for the first Rihm work, and then under Alan Gilbert for the Currier piece, along with contrabassist Roman Patkoló. Lichtes Spiel (for violin and small orchestra) is indeed a "light game," with layered voices in the strings.
DG s iconic artist Anne-Sophie Mutter is breaking new grounds with her new album Live from Yellow Lounge. Inspired by the huge success of her first Yellow Lounge in Berlin in 2013, the new album was recorded live at two special Yellow Lounges, which makes for the first ever YL production on tape, 15 years after the concept was introduced. The events took place on two consecutive nights on 7 and 8 May, 2015 at one of Berlin s hippest venues Neue Heimat and was filmed in cooperation with ZDF and DEF Media.
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).