Anne-Sophie Mutter HOMMAGE À PENDERECKI

The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and the composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki are among the leading musical figures of our age. For more than thirty years these two outstanding musicians have been close friends, and during that time their friendship has proved a fruitful one, repeatedly inspiring and challenging both parties. To mark the composer’s eighty-fifth birthday Deutsche Grammophon is now releasing a very special double album featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter both as a soloist and in partnership with a number of colleagues. All the works that are included here reflect Penderecki’s unique musical language in fascinatingly intense and multifaceted ways. The result is a sensitive and moving homage on the part of the violinist to a musical friend whose Second Violin Sonata she has recorded for the first time.

Penderecki’s works have an existential depth to them that goes far beyond the sheer sensuousness of the musical world that they inhabit. Anne-Sophie Mutter compares their complex, multifaceted nature to the canvases of Pablo Picasso, so varied, extreme and contrastive are they. For the composer himself these works are the end result of a creative process that is both tireless and extremely demanding. As he himself puts it: “I like travelling uncharted pathways. I have to do this whenever I compose, otherwise nothing comes out. I start somewhere in the middle of a work, before moving to the right or left and time and again having to get back on course, which often means retracing my steps. I continue to compose until it becomes clear to me that I could really do it much better. I then start at the beginning.” Penderecki has retained this self-critical attitude right up to the present day. It is an attitude that places enormous demands on him. The works that have come into existence in this way afford impressive proof of his uncompromising dedication to music and provide thrilling evidence of his ability to explore the emotional extremes of human existence.

This double album brings together various pieces that Penderecki has written for the violin and that are performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter in ways that bring out their wealth of tone colours and captivating expressivity, while also striking a personal note. In addition to La Follia, a virtuoso set of variations for unaccompanied violin, and the dialogue-like concert duet for violin and double bass that Anne-Sophie Mutter has recorded with the bass player Roman Patkoló, it is two large-scale, complex works that are at the heart of the present release. Both reflect Penderecki’s multilayered and hugely expressive art of composition. Laid out along symphonic lines, the Second Violin Concerto – subtitled Metamorphosen – was premiered by Anne-Sophie Mutter in 1995: “For me this task is physically and psychologically challenging, but it is a challenge that I am grateful to accept,” says the violinist about the extremely demanding and contrastive work, in which Penderecki provides a virtuoso amalgam of the most varied styles. Like the Second Violin Concerto, the Second Violin Sonata is dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter, who has recorded it for the present album with the pianist Lambert Orkis. The piece is in five movements and resembles a dramatic disquisition on life that ultimately leaves the listener emotionally moved.

Penderecki and Mutter have been friends for many years. It is a friendship that has proved inspirational. They first got to know each other in the early 1980s, although it was not until 1988 that they began to work together closely. This was the year in which the then twenty-five-year-old violinist played Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto under Penderecki’s direction. From the outset the conductor was fascinated by her musical maturity. Their musical association has lasted until the present day. For Anne-Sophie Mutter, it is “far more than mere admiration that has bound me to Krzysztof Penderecki’s works for several decades. I am shaken to the very roots of my being by the depth of emotion that issues from them – almost more than I am by his genius as a composer.” With this double album, Hommage à Penderecki, the violinist pays touching tribute to a truly exceptional composer and to their mutual friendship.

Anne-Sophie Mutter / New York Philharmonic RIHM Lichtes Spiel / CURRIER Time Machines

Time and again she seeks out the challenge of a first performance – perhaps, too, because she regards the chance to engage in a dialogue with living composers as a form of refuge before she returns to a repertory she has known for thirty years and which she nonetheless feels each time is a terra incognita. Above all, however, Anne-Sophie Mutter is motivated by the desire to keep on rediscovering the violin. That is why she seeks out composers who can coax new sounds from her instrument, finding new musical languages and awakening a new sensuality.

She also enjoys returning to musicians she knows. “In the life of a soloist there’s more than just one facet. After premiering a concerto, I generally want a chamber work. This was the case with Krzysztof Penderecki’s Metamorphosen and would also have been the case with Witold Lutosławski if he hadn’t died first.” Wolfgang Rihm’s violin concerto from 1991, Gesungene Zeit, was initially followed by a second orchestral work, Lichtes Spiel, which received its first performance in New York in 2010. But this last-named work was followed almost at once by a piece of chamber music: Dyade. The differences between the two orchestral works are clear for all to hear and see. For Lichtes Spiel, Anne-Sophie Mutter wanted a Mozart orchestra. “For years I’ve been conducting Mozart’s concertos from the violin. I wanted to compare and contrast these wonderful pieces with an alternative work that would be similarly orchestrated but which would contain new markings for the violin.” She had hoped that the resultant restrictions would inspire her, and in this she was to be proved right. “The decision to forgo a vast body of percussion instruments and an elaborate brass department leads necessarily to a greater concentration on the innermost quality of the principal instrument, which is the violin’s singing tone.” This singing tone is central to Rihm’s work, which is subtitled “A Summer Piece”. For Anne-Sophie Mutter, the “light game” conjures up associations of a summer night, a midsummer night’s dream, while the flashing accents of the score recall Shakespeare’s will-o’-the-wisps. “Time and again the flickering lights illuminate an almost romantic in-between state. Perhaps this is where the idea for Lichtes Spiel originates. I find these flickering accents typical of Rihm’s work in general – they were already present in Gesungene Zeit. The manner in which an emotion suddenly flares up and an interval abruptly comes to the forefront of our attention, only for it to withdraw again, is characteristic of Rihm’s musical language in Dyade, too.” (Oswald Beaujean)