20 GRAMOPHONE SEPTEMBER 2019 gramophone.co.uk
ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER
had finished a string quartet, and Unsuk Chin had finished
a piece for two solo fiddles, and I played the world premiere of
Sebastian Currier’s fabulous Ghost Trio for piano trio.’
Can she put her finger on what those composers might have
common? She can try. ‘A certain sense of architecture and ...
I don’t know if sensuality is the right word. Beauty is also not
the right word ... Some understanding that music needs to have
a narrative. Understanding what timbres certain instruments
can provide for a musical gesture.’ We circle back to the beauty/
sensuality problem. ‘Some kind of emotion, whatever you want
to call it – I need to find it there. But that’s very subjective,
obviously. I’m a great Thomas Adès fan, and I’m really jealous
about his first violin concerto. I don’t know why it wasn’t
written for me [it was composed for British violinist Anthony
Marwood] – it would have been perfect for me!’ She could still
play it, surely? ‘No, I want my own.’ Is that forthcoming?
It sounds like it will eventually happen, whether Adès wants it
to or not. ‘He has to work at it, but we have discussed it, and it
looks promising.’
One can understand what Mutter would see in the ferociously
detailed, technically exhausting but also romantically driven
music of Adès. Less so with Boulez, whom she pursued
for a concerto for many years, in the end unsuccessfully.
Being conducted by him drove her admiration, she says. ‘It was
so fascinating to work with him in rehearsals, which was why
I wanted the challenge. I knew I would have probably needed
20 years to study it, but I was willing to do it – if I’d have been
able to do it. I don’t know – maybe it’s better I never found out.’
Mutter’s appetite for new music is tempered by regret for
newer listening habits. Streaming or downloading music
without copyright approval is one bugbear. ‘I grew up very
aware with my composer friends of what it means to create
something, and to have that protected. So I’m a little nervous
about the fact that, in huge parts of the world, respect for that
doesn’t exist anymore. It’s the downside of streaming things from
YouTube and other channels which aren’t supposed to be free.’
More broadly, Mutter is concerned about the implications of
an ‘on-demand’ culture of listening, of people dipping into
music that isn’t fairly representing the efforts of the players,
particularly if they’re listening to highly compressed sound files
while on the go. ‘We are losing the ability of very precise and
careful listening,’ she says. ‘It’s not good for music. I’m really
concerned about the fact that so much subtlety of the moment,
of the musical gesture, of the emotion and greatness of
a composition, is just bypassing us because we don’t have the
time to be here. It’s why I still love the LP. You sit, you
celebrate it, you take the time, and, as much as the CD is great
and streaming is fabulous, whether it’s on your phone, in your
car or in the bathroom, it’s always in the second row of your
attention. You consume it while you do something else.’
What would her sometime mentor Karajan have thought
of a world where his minutely calibrated recordings could be
disseminated so casually? ‘Well, he would also have loved
the fact that music could be available anytime, anywhere.
But it’s like Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling [The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice] – you ask for the ghosts and then they take over.
We asked the ghosts to have music anywhere under any
circumstances, and now we have the copyright problem.
And we have the problem of a record industry that is firing up
one musician after the other, one product after another, because
the market wants new faces, but in classical music things need
to evolve slowly, and they need to evolve over a longer period.Mutter is drawn to composers who understand how the timbres of instruments can provide a narrative or contribute a musical gesture – ‘I need to ind emotion there’