Anne-Sophie Mutter / New York Philharmonic RIHM Lichtes Spiel / CURRIER Time Machines

Time and again she seeks out the challenge of a first performance – perhaps, too, because she regards the chance to engage in a dialogue with living composers as a form of refuge before she returns to a repertory she has known for thirty years and which she nonetheless feels each time is a terra incognita. Above all, however, Anne-Sophie Mutter is motivated by the desire to keep on rediscovering the violin. That is why she seeks out composers who can coax new sounds from her instrument, finding new musical languages and awakening a new sensuality.

She also enjoys returning to musicians she knows. “In the life of a soloist there’s more than just one facet. After premiering a concerto, I generally want a chamber work. This was the case with Krzysztof Penderecki’s Metamorphosen and would also have been the case with Witold Lutosławski if he hadn’t died first.” Wolfgang Rihm’s violin concerto from 1991, Gesungene Zeit, was initially followed by a second orchestral work, Lichtes Spiel, which received its first performance in New York in 2010. But this last-named work was followed almost at once by a piece of chamber music: Dyade. The differences between the two orchestral works are clear for all to hear and see. For Lichtes Spiel, Anne-Sophie Mutter wanted a Mozart orchestra. “For years I’ve been conducting Mozart’s concertos from the violin. I wanted to compare and contrast these wonderful pieces with an alternative work that would be similarly orchestrated but which would contain new markings for the violin.” She had hoped that the resultant restrictions would inspire her, and in this she was to be proved right. “The decision to forgo a vast body of percussion instruments and an elaborate brass department leads necessarily to a greater concentration on the innermost quality of the principal instrument, which is the violin’s singing tone.” This singing tone is central to Rihm’s work, which is subtitled “A Summer Piece”. For Anne-Sophie Mutter, the “light game” conjures up associations of a summer night, a midsummer night’s dream, while the flashing accents of the score recall Shakespeare’s will-o’-the-wisps. “Time and again the flickering lights illuminate an almost romantic in-between state. Perhaps this is where the idea for Lichtes Spiel originates. I find these flickering accents typical of Rihm’s work in general – they were already present in Gesungene Zeit. The manner in which an emotion suddenly flares up and an interval abruptly comes to the forefront of our attention, only for it to withdraw again, is characteristic of Rihm’s musical language in Dyade, too.” (Oswald Beaujean)