Track Listing

1. Violin Concerto 'To The Memory Of An Angel': I. Andante - Allegretto
2. Violin Concerto 'To The Memory Of An Angel': II. Allegro - Adagio
3. 'Time Chant' Music For Violin And Orchestra: Beginning
4. 'Time Chant' - Music For Violin And Orchestra: Bar 179

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30069 in Music
• Released on: 1993-03-16
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .23 pounds

Amazon.com essential recording
Berg's Violin Concerto (1935) is considered by many the most accessible and emotionally engaging piece of music in the atonal idiom. His last completed work, the concerto was written as a memorial "to an angel" upon the premature death of Alma Mahler's daughter Manon Gropius. But as with all of Berg's oeuvre, an autobiography of the composer's inner life is also thoroughly woven into the score. From the deeply reflective nuances of its quiet opening, Anne-Sophie Mutter takes the listener into the heart of Berg's ambiguous lyricism. There's a keen grasp, both by soloist and conductor James Levine, of the work's intricate structure and progression, but never at the price of a coldly disengaged intellectualism. Mutter summons a marvelous array of shadings and colors, effecting a truly haunting impression as tonality makes its ghostlike apparition, first in the guise of a folk song and, in the final part--following a violent cataclysm rendered with fiery power--in the variations on a quote from a chorale by Bach. Throughout, Mutter's intuitive realization of the psychic journey traced by Berg reveals the work's significance as closer in spirit to a requiem of farewell than a traditional concerto.

Mutter's command of an animated tone that pulsates with expressive purpose inspired the contemporary German composer Wolfgang Rihm to write the other work on this disc, Gesungene Zeit ("Time Chant"). It's a mesmerizing neoexpressionist poem of shimmering, elongated string lines--later punctuated with dire eruptions from full orchestra--that seem to form an ether over which the soloist floats. Any sense of time measured in bars becomes negated as Mutter intones Siren-like threads of sound in the highest register. As with the Penderecki Violin Concerto No. 2 and other contemporary works she champions, Mutter plays with a gripping immediacy that indeed makes Rihm's imaginative novelty seem tailor-made for her. --Thomas May

Customer Reviews

Lyrical and Modern
I admit to having been dubious about Anne-Sophie Mutter. There have been so many crossover fiddle-babes lately, that I had subconsciously filed her alongside Vanessa Mae and Linda Brava. That was unfair, probably sexist, and ill-considered, as this disc makes clear.

Mutter is the real thing. She displays an extraordinary command of her instrument in what is really an very difficult and technically demanding piece.

The Berg Violin Concerto is magical. At times jagged and strident and at times soaring and lyrical, it demands exceptional range from the soloist. Although it is [mainly] atonal, the concerto is capable of expressing great warmth and melodic invention in the right hands. Mutter's hands are the right hands.

I hesitate to use another sexist term like "a woman's touch," but the truth is that there is something ineffably feminine in Mutter's performance here. Perhaps it's a lyricism that I don't here in Stern's performance of the same piece. Perhaps it's a lightness of touch. In any event, Mutter proves herself by seeming to start from the position that she has nothing to prove.

I had never listened to Wolfgang Rihm's music before, and Gesungene Zeit remains the only composition of his that I have ever heard. I was quite dubious at first, having been disappointed in the past by neo-conservative "modern" composers like Gorecki and Part. However, I was pleasantly surprised by Rihm's composition on this disc.

It may be just that Mutter plays the solo part so well, of course. But Gesungene Zeit has sort of griwn on me. It is minimal [rather than minimalist] in the same way as Ives' Unanswered Question, with some srong tutti chords in the second half. I'm not sure I would class it as one of the GREAT concetante violin pieces, but it does have a charm -- certainly as performed by Mutter -- that seems to improve with each listen.

Absolutely, completely sublime!
I have long put off writing this review because I was afraid my puny words could not match this recording, which is one of the very finest in my collection of 3,000+ classical CDs. I have about a dozen recordings of this work, as it's my favorite violin concerto (sorry, Beethoven), but this reading is in a league of its own: the only comparable recording is the famous Krasner/Webern, which was only the second performance of the work ever. (The work was written for Krasner...see post script.)

Mutter and Levine are both on a very, very high level here, and the consistency is astonishing as well. Levine never holds back--the fortissimo climaxes in the second movement that represent the physical agony of 18-year-old Manon Gropius are truly hair-raising. (Some conductors perform this with more head than heart, but this is very emotional music and the emotional content should not be downplayed.) As someone else pointed out, Mutter give less vibrato than most in the Corinthian folksong, but the result is haunting, and here she was not abusing this technique, as I feel she now often does. Mutter was far more emotional and connected more with her audience, to my ears, in 1992 than she does today. I would not be interested in hearing what she does with this work now, sad to say, because I think she would turn it more into a vehicle for her technique than an exploration of the work.

But in 1992 Mutter was not yet "Anne Sophie Mutter," and instead she uses her magnificent control over the colors of her violin to imply the evolution of Manon's life, consciousness and illness. Although the grief is already present when we begin, there are also many light and airy moments in the first movement that make the grief feel more like freshadowing. In the second movement the illness is already fully present, and we hear what can only be the wracking pain of the illness. Her violin thus sounds, if not weak, at least subdued and drained when the Bach Chorale enters. But the most astonishing effect is saved for last: as the final bars play, the Corinthian theme is heard again, seemingly as Manon's last statement, and Mutter somehow gives her tone here an eerie "disembodied" quality, as though Manon is departing from this earth. It's not the colorless vibratoless approach that she overuses nowadays, but something very special. I must go back and check my Krasner recording to see if he did it. Then Levine brings the orchestra in for the fattest, warmest chords of all as we feel Manon has ended her suffering.

I am aware that we now know this masterpiece has multiple interpretations, and Berg apparently had more than one woman in mind when he wrote the work (the concerto is filled with various numerical mysticisms), but at the same time, we don't know who those other women were or what the rest of the "program" was, so I have a feeling Mutter and Levine took the Gropius story as their reference point, as one has to pick something as a focus. Agreed the trombones can't do that glissando from Bb to Eb in the second movement properly, but I am so wrapped up in the music that I just don't care!

Through all this there is an effortless quality that I have never heard in any other recording of this concerto, save possibly the Krasner. (It's hard to tell--the sound is very poor in spots.) Not a gesture is wasted; there is no loss of momentum, not even for a second. Mutter and Levine know exactly where they are going, and the result is one of the greatest orchestral recordings in the catalog, both a sonic tour-de-force and a tender elegy, a modernist work and a deeply Romantic piece filled with the echoes of 19th century Europe. The breadth they achieve is surpassed only by how they manage to unify it all. The Berg is so overwhelming a work that each time I put it on, I am in no mood to play the Rihm that comes after it, as it would have to be anticlimactic, and so I have to confess I have never listened it. Someday I must evaluate that work separately.

(Post script: I've recently found out that Louis Krasner, a couple of years ago in the New York Times, praised this recording as one of the very best. So if you don't believe me, take *his* word for it!)

Anne-Sophie Mutter Plays Berg
Alban Berg (1885 -- 1935) composed his violin concerto as a requiem for a young woman, Manon Gropius, but the work effectively became Berg's own requiem as well. It is Berg's last completed score, written in 1935. This is passionate, emotive music which staddles the bounds between atonality and musical romanticism. The performance by Anne-Sophie Mutter and James Levine conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, recorded in 1992,is justly celebrated. This is an ideal introduction to Berg and to his masterful violin concerto. This is difficult music, make no mistake. The new listerner should stay with it, as the violin concerto will reward many hearings.

I used the discussion of this work in Michael Steinberg's book, "The Concerto," (1998) as a guide to my listening. Steinberg writes with great enthusiasm for Berg's concerto and gives the reader a good, brief introduction to Berg and his work. The violin concerto is a hermetic work. That is, the concerto is filled with allusions to Berg's love life, to affairs both late in his life and to an affair he had as a young man. The work also shows Berg's fascination with secrecy and with numerology. He followed certain pseudo-science of his day in thinking that the number 23 had some mystical significance for the life-rhythm while the number 28 had significance for women. This thinking, and other beliefs in lucky numbers and the like are built into Berg's score.

But of the music were only a code to be deciphered, it would not be of much interest. The emotion and force of the violin concerto drew me in and will make the work live for other listeners as well. The work is in two movements, each of which has two parts. The first movement opens slowly and elegaically with a quiet figure in the harp, followed shortly by an ascending 12-tone figure for the violin. The second part of the music is more rapid in tempo and develops nostagically an old folk-song -- in Berg's case, perhaps, to remind him of a love affair he had when young, the memory of which remained with him through life.

The second movement opens with a violently dissonant passage that speaks of calamity and loss. The second part of the movement, though, is a response and an answer to deep sorrow. It develops a chorale theme from a Bach cantata, "Es ist Genug" through a combination of Bach's harmonies and Berg's own. The chorale goes through a number of variations and moods ranging from a rememberance of love and passion to quiet acceptance and resignation. The work fades away with only the solo violin remaining at the end. The solo and the orchestral writing are deeply intertwined in this concerto.

It may be a shame that Wolfgang Rihm's "Time Chant: Music for Violin and Orchestra" is the companion piece on this CD. It seemed to me a thoughtful work, but it pales in comparison with the Berg. Rihm is a prolific contemporary German composer, and he wrote this work for Anne-Sophie Mutter. This was my first exposure to his music. The "Time Chant" is in two movements, both of which feature the violin playing declamatory passages at the top of its register punctuated on occasion by orchestral outbursts. The work shimmers and has the quality of a chant but functions mostly as a showpiece for Ms. Mutter's formidable technique. There are some striking passages for the violin but they are surrounded by musical moments in which not much happens.

The Mutter-Levine reading of Berg's concerto is more than enough reason to hear this CD with Rihm's work an intriguing addition. This disk offers an outstanding opportunity to get to know one of the great masterpieces of Twentieth Century music.

Robin Friedman