Prodigy’s Principle: Keep It Fresh

Anne-Sophie Mutter sounds slightly embarrassed when she explains why, of Brahms’ three sonatas for violin and piano, she feels closest to the first, in G-major. “It quotes his ‘Regenlied’ [Rainsong], where he looks back on his lost youth,” the celebrated German violinist said in a recent transatlantic phone conversation. “And I’m kind of reaching the age where I can appreciate that.”

Mutter has been honing the Brahms sonatas, which she brings to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Wednesday, over the course of her career. “Warm-blooded, living, breathing perfection,” wrote critic Marc Shulgold when she played them six years ago in Denver.

Yet it is hard not to giggle, or at least raise an eyebrow, when Mutter speaks of her lost youth: She is, after all, only 33. Then again, Mutter has faced a lot in those three decades.

The daughter of a newspaper publisher in Germany’s Black Forest, she was 13 when Berlin Philharmonic conductor Herbert von Karajan--then one of the most powerful figures in the music industry--made her his protegee and pronounced her “the greatest musical prodigy since [Yehudi] Menuhin.”

By the time she entered her 20s, the age when many child prodigies drop off the map, she defied the statistics, successfully making the transition to an adult career, complete with grown-up good looks. When she was 26, she married and started a family, all the while keeping her career on the fast track, logging as many as 120 appearances a year. Then in August 1995, Mutter’s husband, Detlef Wunderlich, died, leaving her to juggle single parenthood with her itinerant professional life.

Mutter, who likes to keep her private life private, isn’t about to say in detail what she sees when she looks back over her “lost youth” and that challenging history. But what the rest of the world remarks on are two constants: real talent coupled with an unshakable will.

In 1993, James Oestreich took stock of Mutter’s artistic fortunes: “A decade ago,” he wrote in the New York Times, “there was little reason to believe that Ms. Mutter would develop much beyond her gorgeous purity of sound to achieve thoughtful musicianship. Now . . . the 30-year-old fiddler continues to evolve at an astonishing rate.” As to determination, in her straightforward manner, she says, “I’m just not the type who will leave everything up to the moment.” And, in another conversation: “Sometimes you get great art by accident. But I am not that type of musician.”

Hardly. In her early 20s, she famously walked out of a rehearsal with conductor Sergiu Celibidache and the Munich Philharmonic, and canceled their concerts because he refused to accommodate her tempos. (The legendary conductor was booed when he walked on stage that night.) More recently, when a new composition she commissioned turned out sounding as though it were “written by accident--’bloop bloop’ here and ‘blip blip’ there”--Mutter refused to perform it.

And, even though she has been devoted to music since she was 6, her commitment actually seems to be deepening. Pianist Lambert Orkis has been Mutter’s accompanist since 1988, when cellist Mstislav Rostropovich recommended him to her. Speaking from his teaching studio in Washington, D.C., a couple of weeks ago, Orkis recalled that when Mutter first worked with him, she approached their joint preparations the same way as Rostropovich--rehearsals a couple of days before the first concert were considered plenty of time.

But now, says Orkis, he and Mutter start rehearsing their programs years in advance. And even if they’ve performed a piece 26 times, they’ll have a full rehearsal in the hall before each concert.

When Mutter went on “vacation” last summer, the score of the Brahms’ Violin Concerto, which she has been playing since she was a teenager, was in her suitcase. “I’m really restudying it, not just replaying it,” she emphasizes. “Going back to it again and again is really what keeps it very fresh. Sometimes you find new phrasings or even a fingering that gives a different color. Or you find, ‘My God, here’s a subito piano that I never did that brings out a voice in the orchestra,’ and then you feel like a complete idiot because all these years you have completely overlooked it! But that’s how life is; as long as you find something new it’s fine. It must be terrible if you’re always biting your tail like a dog!”

In Orkis’ phrase, she has retained her “joy in the music and the wonder of discovery.” She prefers live recording--especially of recital repertory--to capture the one-time interaction with a particular audience. She refuses to sign an exclusive contract with any record company because she dislikes the commitment, years in advance, to a specific number of recordings. “It’s so sterile, so police-like,” she says.

Mutter also puts great store in the value of the totally new. She credits her discovery of new music, in her 20s, with the evolution of her playing in recent years. It all started in 1985 when Swiss conductor and new music patron Paul Sacher asked her to premiere “Chain II” by Lutoslawski. Mutter initially hesitated.

“Of course I was very flattered, but on the other hand I thought, ‘Hmm, there I’ll really get into big trouble, and I’ll look like an idiot!’ ” But she quickly fell in love with the improvisatory elements of the piece and its new sound world. “I found these islands of wonderful sounds that I had always wanted to apply, but I [had] never found music where it actually would have been appropriate to do so. From that moment on I was hooked.”

Mutter’s passion for new music caught career-watchers off-guard, and yanked her permanently out of the shadow of the musically conservative Karajan. She continues to commission, premiere and record a steady stream of new compositions by well-known composers such as Lutoslawski and Penderecki, as well as emerging ones.

These days the Munich resident commits to only 50 or 60 appearances a year--a scaling back that began a few years ago when her husband first became ill. Now that she’s become a single parent of her two children, she says she’ll stay at that reduced pace: “Life as a human being counts much more than business.”

Her musical “restudying” is now mostly concentrated on Beethoven. Mutter and Orkis will perform cycles of all 10 Beethoven sonatas for violin and piano next season. Her bookshelf is crammed with Beethoven studies, and she’s also devouring books on child psychology--specifically, those that deal with the ways parents transfer their own childhood problems onto their offspring. “My God, it’s horrible. But as I like to analyze music, I like also to analyze my own behavior, and my reactions toward people--especially my children,” she says.

And her pursuit of the new is still in high gear. For years, she says, she has been thinking about rerecording the Mozart Violin Concertos, which she recorded in her teens with Karajan. But now she’s considering doing the new version with period instrument guru Roger Norrington, who sparked her interest in “even more refined Mozart playing” at a chance encounter at Tanglewood some years ago.

Maybe they could meet halfway, she suggests, using modern instruments but some aspects of period style. “I think it could be a wonderful lesson--and I think I could bring something to him too, I hope.”

But as usual, Mutter isn’t rushing into anything. “I’m going to meet with him later this year,” she says cheerfully, “and we will decide if we can live with each other’s views, or if we [would] just kill ourselves.”

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ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Date: Wednesday, 8 p.m. Prices: $10-$60. Phone: (213) 365-3500.