J.S. Bach, S. Gubaidulina: Violin Cocertos - Anne-Sophie Mutter, London Symphony Orchestra

J.S. Bach & S. Gubaidulina : Violin Concertos

Anne-Sophie Mutter / Trondheim Soloists, LSO


“In tempus praesens is certainly one of Gubaidulina's most striking and impressive works of recent years. Mutter's performance of this stunning piece, undoubtedly one of the finest violin concertos to emerge in the past 30 years, is absolutely mesmerising. Her Bach, too, is charismatic.” BBC Music Magazine, October 2008 *****
Especially for HisFawn

Reviews : Gramophome Music Magazine : October 2008 - Editor's Choice
Anne-Sophie Mutter has lost no time in recording the violin concerto written for her by Sofia Gubaidulina in 2006-07. In a single movement running for about 32 minutes, it shows the composer's concern to make a direct and immediate impact, avoiding complicated materials but using very expansive forms. It's possible to sense the kind of allusions to Mahlerian archetypes that are no less prominent in Shostakovich or Schnittke. Yet Gubaidulina has her own very personal musical identity, and the concerto's strategies for playing off heights against depths, lament against affirmation, are very powerfully realised. The risks of rambling, improvisatory musing are triumphantly avoided, and the work's final stages appear to bring starkly opposed images of extinction and rebirth into a strongly ambivalent conclusion that both affirms and questions resolution.
This darkly inviting music is splendidly performed. You'd expect the Mutter/Gergiev combination to be combustible, and there is certainly no reticence or half-measures in the way the music's expressive core, its play with visions of hell and heaven, is exposed. Gestures towards traditional consonant harmony stand out strangely, and dancelike patterns are clearly not going to survive for very long in a context where brooding and turbulence are the principal qualities. The resplendent recording celebrates the score's rich colouring while never allowing the solo line, played with all this performer's natural theatricality and poise, to lose its prominence. Maybe, at one particularly stark climax, the hammered rhythmic repetitions in the orchestra seem over-emphatic. But urgency rather than reticence drives Gubaidulina's thought, and this performance never lets you forget it.
It would have been good to hear these performers in Gubaidulina's other major work 'The final stages bring starkly opposed images of extinction and rebirth into a strongly ambivalent conclusion' for violin and orchestra, Offertorium. Instead, the pair of Bach concertos speak of a distant musical world in which stability and spontaneity achieved an extraordinary conjunction. The performances are neat, tidy, dispatched with elegance and vigour. Yet they reinforce the gulf that musically separates then from now, and all- Gubaidulina discs are not as common as they should be.

Geoff Brown - September 19, 2008

When Anne-Sophie Mutter plays, you listen. With a violinist so sturdy in tone, intense in emotion, and steely in technique, there’s actually no choice. Take the A minor Bach concerto at the start of the glamorous 45-year-old’s first new CD since her Mozart avalanche of 2006. She’s leading the Trondheim Soloists; all musicians use copies of Baroque bows, but not “authentic” gut strings.
Springing muscles prance through the exhilarating first movement. In the second, Mutter reminds us that she can play legato without simpering. For the finale she dons dancing shoes, yet treats rhythms with a singing grace. It’s a most refreshing performance; not quite matched by the E major concerto that follows, but you can’t have everything.
And Bach is only the hors d’oeuvre. The main meal is Sofia Gubaidulina’s recent violin concerto In tempus praesens (“In the Present Time”), written especially for Mutter and heard at the Barbican last year. As interesting and febrile as her classical playing is, it’s great to have the violinist back championing the new, especially a work as impressive as this.
Both Bach and Gubaidulina, she says, combine the cerebral and the spiritual. The connection is plausible, though the mystically-minded Gubaidulina takes her violin on a journey Bach could never have imagined. It’s a darkness-to-light journey, with the violin struggling upwards toward peace, or at least hope, and Valery Gergiev’s London Symphony Orchestra often bent on dragging it down.
Mutter is a wizard at being mercurial, and her quick changes during the music’s half-hour arc are breathtakingly dextrous. So is her dialogue with the orchestra. Bumblebee buzzings, rushing arpeggios, twinkling stars, the growlings of hell: the range of textures and emotions seems infinite, and they’re charted and layered with a communicative power found in few of Gubaidulina’s other recent works.
Separate index points for the concerto’s five sections might have been useful. Even so, there’s no reason for listeners to lose their way.

Tracklist :

01. Bach : Concerto For Violin In A Minor. BWV 1041 : I. Allegro Moderato [0:03:36.48]
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin and conductor
Trondheim Soloists
02. II. Andante [0:06:40.72]
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin and conductor
Trondheim Soloists
03. III. Allegro Assai [0:03:13.86]
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin and conductor
Trondheim Soloists
04. Bach : Concerto For Violin In E Major, BWV 1042 : I. Allegro [0:07:44.02]
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin and conductor
Trondheim Soloists
05. II. Adagio [0:07:11.05]
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin and conductor
Trondheim Soloists
06. III. Allegro Assai [0:02:36.24]
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin and conductor
Trondheim Soloists
07. Gubaidulina : In Tempus Praesens - Concerto For Violin And Orchestra [0:32:45.41]