Casual Nonchalance

By the time an erstwhile hot young virtuoso has lived through a couple decades of concertizing, whatever keeps you still listening is necessarily something other than hotness, youth, or virtuosity. Sometimes, to be sure, even the youth and the hotness persist longer than you would think possible. (Joshua Bell remains implausibly fresh and cute; I say nothing of the enchanted portrait obviously hidden in Ian Swensen's closet.) Anne-Sophie Mutter, more than 30 years on from her first appearance as a Karajan-sponsored wunderkind, is as striking a physical presence as ever, which is saying something. (In her slender, flared, strapless gray gown she looked rather like a wise mermaid.) But the audience that filled Davies Symphony Hall Monday night for Mutter's recital with longtime duo partner Lambert Orkis was there to hear an artist whose postprodigy career has been less like Bell's than like, say, Midori's.

Despite favoring Deutsche Grammophon with the occasional disc of bonbons, she has specialized for more than a decade in two things: important new music (like the Gubaidulina concerto whose U.S. premiere she plays here next year), and concentrated, serious-minded programs of core masterworks. The Mutter/Orkis duo has a penchant for digging into a corner of the repertoire and holing up there for a year or so, playing nothing else. (The complete violin sonatas of Beethoven and then Mozart got this treatment; you can listen to the resulting albums online and online here, respectively.) Evidently it is Brahms' turn — a happy coincidence from the point of view of San Francisco Performances, which cosponsored this recital with the San Francisco Symphony and into whose 2007-2008 miniseries of Brahms chamber music the program fits neatly.

Expectations Averted

You might expect such intense study of a small body of music to result in performances polished into immaculate rigidity, every gesture minutely judged and balanced and foreordained. Indeed, that's what the bulk of the critical comment on the Beethoven and Mozart programs had led me to expect. What I actually heard Monday night was something quite different. In the A-Major Sonata (Op. 100) with which Mutter and Orkis opened the program, my first impression was not of calculation but, on the contrary, a certain casualness, even negligence in Mutter's playing. Her bowing and her vibrato both varied nonchalantly. She let her bow drift toward the fingerboard often and seemingly at haphazard, letting her sound go sketchy and flutelike; with the left hand, she favored either a slow, wide vibrato or none at all, switching abruptly from one to the other. Flautando and nonvibrato are both familiar rhetorical arrows in the violinist's quiver — call them "time-honored devices" if you tend to like them, "old tricks" if you don't. What was unusual about Mutter's playing wasn't that she used them; it was that she generally didn't seem to use them in furtherance of any particular musical point. They were just part of her sound, integral to her way with the instrument. The closest analogy I can make is to a great singer's individual vocal mannerisms, those qualities of the voice that belong to it independently of the music being sung and that make this or that singer instantly recognizable. Those are the same traits, of course, that make a singer infallibly irritating if one or another of them happens to grate on you. Mutter's manner of "singing," with its billowy, bulging, and yet also fickle vibrato and its erratic tone production, took a lot of getting used to for me, and an impatient listener might well just tag the playing "mannered" and have done with it. But there was gold to be found in there, and the proportion of it increased steadily as the recital went on. Op. 100 seemed to suit Mutter least well of the three sonatas; there was a curious diffidence to much of the quiet playing, a strenuous bluster elsewhere, and an overall lumpiness that the performance's many breathtaking moments didn't altogether recompense. The middle movement's scherzando sections were the standouts. Brahms doesn't give the violinist many opportunities to bring the bow off the string, but where he does, Mutter's keen, alert articulation was a joy. In the G-Major Op. 78, which followed, Mutter mined a vein of fragile wistfulness that I don't think I've heard brought out so successfully in the piece before. Like everything else on the program, it was inconsistent. She would play with heartbreakingly gentle grace one moment, lunge at you with that vibrato the next. After a few such incidents I took to bracing myself preemptively for the next shattering of the atmosphere, rather than allowing myself to trust her.

High-Octane Playing

Still, there was so much to admire: not only the apt uses she found for that whispering, frail flautando sound, but also the brawny, intense playing she brought to bear where the music needed it. (In the first movement's development she was recklessly impetuous. I swear that Orkis twice had to elide the better part of a beat to catch up to her.) Best of all were the opening pages — with Orkis paying a good deal more attention to the hemiolas than any other pianist I've heard — and the hushed, urgent, limpidly accompanied opening of the finale. The D-Minor Op. 108, shortest and fiercest of the set, came last, and here Mutter sounded entirely at ease. Or almost so, anyway. The first movement's undulating eighth-note lines were something of a surprise: Where you might have expected that dramatically hushed, smooth, eerie way of hers to find perfect employment, she made what was obviously a conscious decision to accent every other note. The point was presumably to highlight the notes belonging to the movement's first theme, but this seemed an overblunt way of making it. From then on it was home free. The slow movement, to be sure, can thrive on something less than Mutter's high-octane sound, but there was no denying its potency. The scherzo was played as well as I've ever heard it — faster than usual, elvishly light on its feet (Orkis was amazing here), inflected with not only an awe-inspiring specificity but a menacing edge as well. And the finale was pure dynamite, Mutter bowing with a sort of controlled frenzy and Orkis showing the depth of Brahmsian sound he can put out when he's not reining himself in. Orkis, by the way, was a joy to hear throughout — incisive, transparent, and ever alive to the fun to be gotten from Brahms's meaty textures and his metrical tics. My only complaint is that he was occasionally stingy with his sound, not letting himself sink into the keys and slighting the left hand in particular. The D-Minor's finale showed the richness of tone he's capable of. There should have been more of it. That amazing finish demanded encores, and as the program was short, Mutter was generous with them, rattling off three Brahms Hungarian Dances in succession (Nos. 7, 1, and 2) with irresistible schmaltz and swagger. (The duo's recordings of No. 1, No. 2, and No. 7 may be heard online.) Petitioned for a fourth encore by the insatiable Davies audience, Mutter responded with Brahms' Op. 49/4, better known as the "Brahms Lullaby." We took the hint.