3 Violin Sonatas - Brahms You don't have to wait long at an Anne-Sophie Mutter recital to hear something special. The 34-year-old German mega-star of the fiddle displayed some of the hallmarks of her style at the very start of Brahms's G major Violin Sonata - tone of a haunting, melting sensuality (the sort that usually provokes silken or buttery similes) and, already in the opening phrases, rubato that positively embraces pulse-threatening extremities of hesitation.
It's a style which, since her first appearance in Ireland in 1989, seems to have developed in its technical elaboration as well as expanding in musical freedom and range of self-expression. Violin-playing of more variegated tonally-beguiling beauty would be hard to find - indeed, would probably have been hard to find at any time in the history of violin-playing.
As a highly individual revelation of the colouristic resources of the violinist's art, expressed through the music of the standard concert repertory, a Mutter recital is, I suspect, beyond compare.
But the style has developed now well beyond the needs or demands of the music.
There are important forces of cohesion which are missing. Phrases are broken by moments which linger into stasis. The detailing becomes precious. The exactingly precise calculations of foreground and background, delivered to perfection by both Mutter and her regular pianist, Lambert Orkis, obscure the terra firma of the middle-ground. With everything striving to be so special, nothing remains in its familiar, expected place. And where everything is special, nothing is.
Well, no. It's not quite that extreme. The slow-burning intensity at the beginning of the first sonata's Adagio, was well sustained, and there were some stretches in the D minor Sonata of the second half which were carried through without too much fuss. But the cornucopian richness of moment-by-moment response, like the effect of an actor over-inflecting, was to leave this listener both thoroughly in awe of the mesmerising finish of the playing and desperately wanting a delivery that was altogether simpler - plain but musically functional.
