Search - Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Andre Previn :: Tchaikovsky, Korngold: Violin Concertos

Just plain awful

minacciosa | Boston, MA | 11/29/2005

(1 out of 5 stars)

"What happened to Mutter? This is just egregiously overdone violin playing featuring a horribly throbbing vibrato that makes her play sharp through the entire disc, tempos fast enough to smother the music and a pliant conductor who lets her get away with it all. She routinely holds the final note of a run far longer than notated, ostensibly for drama, but the effect smears the surrounding harmony. She tries to play the final movement of the Korngold so fast that she either has to slow down some places or completely fakes a passage. There is so much wrong with this that there's no room for me to recount each example of her descent into complete self-indulgence. These are two great violin concertos, and you can find better traversals of them just about anywhere.



What was Previn thinking during all this? Well I suppose he has to live with her, so one star for marital harmony. Still, her playing is completely tasteless and clearly so willful that one can tell she's sounding exactly the way she wants. However, it begs the question, who wants to hear it?



UPDATE 2006:

If you wonder why she didn't win a Grammy for this, please re-read the above. It ain't just me, folks."

What the heck is happening to Mutter???

John Grabowski | USA | 07/29/2006

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Sure she commands the biggest fee of any soloist in classical music. This must make violinists like the criminally-underrated Viktoria Mullova shake her head in wonderment. This is another very bad, very egotistical, very vulgar interpretation from a fiddler who's become too full of herself. She has commented that her interpretations today have little in common with what she was doing early in her career. Indeed! And that's a shame. She made some great recordings back then.



The Tchaikovsky, which has one of the stiffest, most uninspired accompaniments I've ever heard from hubby Andre, is crass--perhaps she's trying to achieve Eduard Hanslick's assessment that the music stinks to the ear. She certainly tries to accomplish that, with an overbearing, thick sound, a moany (not throaty, moany) tone, supersized phrasing even in intimate passages, all sorts of unscripted glissandi, notes held beyond their notation, and theatrical vibrato. This is just bad taste. Her technical prowess is never in doubt (though she seems to doubt it; she seems to be shouting "LISTEN TO WHAT I CAN DO!" every few seconds), but part of what makes a musician great is the ability to divine the composition, so to speak. While to a degree this can be subjective, there are stylistic guidelines that can be gleaned from the score, performance practice, etc., and there comes a point beyond which I am willing to forgive. Just listen to her opening phrasing...the streeeeetching of every third note, the excessively fussy micro-diminuendos and micro-crescendos at every third bar, the distortion of phrases into nonsense, the outright schmaltzy approach that honestly seems to disrespect the composer. The Amazon review states that she incorporates the first movement's cadenza as though it were an integral part of the work. I seriously have to question if the reviewer listened to the disc (sober, at least). This cadenza has about six thousand separate gearshifts when it comes to tempo, dynamics, color, and vibrato, all of which call attention to her technique and nothing more. I cannot escape the feeling lately that she is just using music--*any* music--as a springboard to show off. And I used to be one of her biggest fans.



The Korngold, a wonderful and neglected work, is here schmaltzed to such an extent that it sounds like not just film music (as Korngold was a great film composer) but a parody of film music. Over the opening bars I can practically hear the narration, "I remember the last time I kissed her, on that bridge in Paris, before I said goodbye forever. I can still smell her perfume on my collar, feel her hair against my face. Now she's just a memory, a dame in a distant land..." Again Previn turns in a routine performance, though at least it's not quite as rhythmically stiff. (As Mutter has become more showboaty, he's become blander and blander, until he must be The Dullest Conductor on Earth, even duller than Wolfgang Sawallisch or Kurt Masur [there should be a special award for that; it's not easy].) At least the cadenza here isn't an embarrassment. The sound is muffled for the orchestra, upfront and larger-than-life for our egomaniacal fiddler. For the Tchaikovsky, you want a great recording in modern sound, get Mullova/Ozawa (don't worry, Seiji is in good form here) on Philips. It's coupled with a stunning Sibelius concerto. Another fine modern performance I used to enjoy was Stern/Rostropovich (mostly for Stern), but this has never made it to CD except briefly in Japan. For Korngold, give Heifetz a try. As for this CD, DG should sever her expensive contract and use the dough to hire some fresh talent less burdened with ego. Try Christian Tetzlaff for starters."

So over the top, it comes back around again

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 11/20/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Clealry this CD is a divider, not a uniter. Mutter steps out front with swoony romanticism and self-indulgence so over the top it comes back around and sounds like a reincarnation of Kreisler, Elman, Zimbalist, and their bygone ilk. She is possessed of gorgeous tone and unstinting technical resources, but Mutter doesn't put them at the service of anything but her own whims. That can be maddening or it can fill you with stardust, depending on your mood.



No doubt her earlier live Tchaikovsky concerto with Karajan was a stunner. Now that her mannerisms have grown unchecked, she's become a love-her-or-hate-her musician like Salerno-Sonnenberg, albeit with much more refinement and quality in the playing per se. When it comes to the Korngold, Mutter becomes so sugary that it makes the Tchaikovsky seem like Bach's Art of the Fugue for sobriety. Previn amiably goes along with loose, wayward accompaniments."