DUTILLEUX: Sur le meme accord; BARTOK: Violin Concerto No. 2; STRAVINSKY: Violin Concerto in D – Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin/ Kurt Masur/Orchestre National de France (Dutilleux)/ Seiji Ozawa/Boston Symphony (Bartok) – DGG

by | Jul 1, 2005 | Classical Reissue Reviews | 0 comments

DUTILLEUX: Sur le meme accord; BARTOK: Violin Concerto No. 2;
STRAVINSKY: Violin Concerto in D – Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin/ Kurt
Masur/Orchestre National de France (Dutilleux)/ Seiji Ozawa/Boston
Symphony (Bartok) Paul Sacher/Philharmonia Orchestra (Stravinsky) – DGG
B0004049-02  68:45 (Distrib. Universal)****:

Inscriptions that span fifteen years in the career of virtuoso
Anne-Sophie Mutter, the latest of these reissues is from November 2003,
when Mutter gave the world premier recording (as well as the world
premier, April 28, 2002) of Henri Dutilleux’s Nocturne “On the One
Chord,” which Paul Sacher had commissioned around 1985. The earliest of
the reissues is the Stravinsky Concerto, recorded February 1988. The
collaboration with Seiji Ozawa in Boston for the Bartok B Major
Concerto comes from February 1991.

Each of the three works demands something unique from the color
repertory in Mutter’s technical arsenal. Its subsequent materials
derived from the opening six-note chord, the Dutilleux Nocturne exacts
remarkable nuances of dynamic touch and exalted lyricism, even as it
shrieks or slides its eerie way across our sensibilities. Alternately
sweet and percussive, the Dutilleux shares some dynamic qualities with
Bartok and Stravinsky, but the syntax is entirely idiosyncratic, with
metric divisions that borrow from the worlds of Webern and Boulez. The
Bartok Concerto is quite a large-scale performance, with Mutter and
Ozawa’s pulling out all the stops for the finale, which is a
superheated recycling of materials from the opening movement, now even
more concentrated and rarified. The melancholy yearning of the opening
movement and the second movement Andante tranquillo is especially
ardent.  The Stravinsky Concerto is all vinegar and wit, even its
interior Arias in D Minor and F# Minor, with their dry lyricism. The
Toccata movement has fine balances between the sudden outbursts of wind
color and the violin‚s breezy, punctuated figures and slides. The
entirely sophisticated manner of the Concerto has more than a touch of
Poulenc about it, the boulevardier’s crisp aphorisms in sound,
eminently pointed and often barbed.

–Gary Lemco

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