Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter on Mozart, momhood
Onstage Anne-Sophie Mutter is the picture of cool virtuosity, in command even when she is tearing into a tough concerto. Offstage, the German-born violinist is a virtuoso in another realm just as deep. She has built two orphanages in Romania that house at least 230 children between them, which she supports with benefit concerts.
Mutter also recently performed to support the Leipzig, Germany, Refugee Council project of "Integration durch Bildung (Integration through Education)" that helps young refugees — many of them unaccompanied children, she lamented — with education and adaptation in Germany. Mutter, whose name appropriately translates to "mother," doesn't skimp on attention to her own two adult children, ages 23 and 25, either.
"I'm texting them a trillion times a day," she conceded. Before cellphones were everywhere, she recalled, it was much harder: "I would run inside and go through the operator to call and see how everyone was." So, since she can, she'll probably flash a comment or two back to Europe after her appearance at Artis—Naples on Thursday with longtime pianist Lambert Orkis.
For this concert, Mutter has mixed the old, Mozart's A Major Violin sonata and ar arely heard Respighi sonata; the new, Sebastain Currier's "Clockwork"; and the spicy, the daring Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo Capriccio. A very few questions with her yield a lot of education from a lifelong student of composers and their music:
Naples Daily News: There are many lists of violin concertos that are considered the best (for some reason they’re generally the most difficult, too) ever written, but I am wondering if you have a list of the five violin sonatas you consider the best ever written?
Anne-Sophie Mutter:Actually, it's a great question to look away from the solo repertoire and consider chamber music as very important. There are pieces which have a key position in the music history. That is true for basically all the Mozart sonatas.
The string instruments in the 1800s were not really considered proper partners to the piano. Mozart was the first composer who really brought these two instruments to an equal level. And that's why playing Mozart sonatas is such a great endeavor. To play all 16 sonatas — that is quite an extraordinary task. ...
The 21st is the only one in a minor key, and it's only two movements. It's rather simple and, one might say, not technically sophisticated. But because it has been written in Paris after the death of his mother, to bring the right expression — and then you play around with non-vibatro or vibatro and with the tempi — with the few notes Mozart has written in that piece, it seems to be utterly difficult to bring out that depth of emotion.
Then that's true as well for the A Major sonata (Kerschel No. 526) , which we are going to play. That is on a very different level of virtuosity, particularly the last movement, the presto movement, where the piano never stops, but the violin is also running around in somersaults.
The A Major is very closely woven between violin and piano. It's like a constant dialogue, where one is like an old couple — where he is starting sentences and she is finishing them. And that's what he very much liked in his later sonatas. It's very beautiful to craft that language. ... Mozart would be first on my list, for one sonata or all of them.
The next would be Beethoven, for which I've also played the entire cycle. I think the Kreutzer sonata (No. 9) really sticks out because of its incredible virtuosity, as much as a violin concerto or piano concerto. It's pretty surprising modulations and it has huge melodic arcs, long-spun musical ideas. And the movements are so diverse. That's quite unique, the first being very impatient and (full of ) fury, the second being very meditative, with all these beautiful and melodic variations.
NDN: Lewis Kaplan, for whom the contemporary “Clockwork,” by Sebastian Currier, was written, was just in Naples on Feb. 28 for a talk. It is on your program. What attracted you to it as part of your repertoire?
Mutter: Sebastian's is one of the few compositions from a living composer that I have played that were not written for me. ... He had just won a composer's competition (the Grawemeyer Award) and Lambert was on the jury ... We looked at it and we both totally fell in love with it, because it is so challenging and witty and unusual.
It deals with multiple layers of different rhythms. Sometimes Lambert has not only two rhythms in both hand but three ... It's really like a roomful of watches, or clocks, going nuts.
It's rhythmical interaction and it's like the works inside the clock. ... That's very much the role between the violin and the piano. It has to be very much interlocking, incredibly precise or it falls apart.
NDN: Your own foundation as been tremendously supportive of young musicians, and I understand you're playing a concert in Leipzig, Germany, for the organization of "Integration through Education" for refugees. Tell us about it.
Mutter: That program helps a small number, about 400 to 600 students, who will be helped with all their subjects in school. The concert income will be divided through "Integration through Education" and a program of integration through music. ... you just make music together. They're joining in choir or getting choir lessons. They get together with people from Leipszig.
Nothing has been as wonderful, and as unifying, I think, as making music together. I think integration through education and integration through music together pretty much covers it all. It covers the cerebral part as well as the emotional.
This (second) program is for adults, a choir program. You can sing by ear — it's not as difficult as learning an instrument. Of course, now that I've said that, singing in tune is not always that easy!
If you go
Anne-Sophie Mutter
Who: Violin virtuoso with longtime pianist, Lambert Orkis
Where: Hayes Hall, Artis—Naples, 5833 Pelican Bay Blvd., North Naples
When: 8 p.m. Thursday, April 6
Tickets: $75-$105
To buy: a
rtisnaples.org or 239-597-1900 or at the box office
