Anne-Sophie Mutter - The Club Album: Anne-Sophie Mutter Live from Yellow Lounge (2015) [Including Bonus Tracks]

If, as the prophet so aptly put it, the Ethiopian can change his skin and the leopard his spots, there is no reason to imagine that Anne-Sophie Mutter can’t do a club night. The Ice Queen of the violin, Germany’s first international virtuoso of modern times, has been awoken to club culture by her 20-somethings children and would like to have a slice of the action. Promo videos for this release show her chatting up a young audience in a Berlin den and generally acting in a manner altogether out of character from her aloof and self-absorbed concert-hall persona. Just shows that anyone can change if the will is there.

As for the music, Anne-Sophie opens with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which she could probably play if you woke her up in the middle of the night and handed her a tortoiseshell haircomb and brush set. She has recorded it twice before on DG, both huge sellers. Here she plays just two movements of Vivaldi and two of Bach’s Double Concerto, interspersing them with club sweeteners like Gershwin’s Three Preludes and Debussy’s cakewalk. The accompaniment comes from an 11-piece band known as Mutter’s Virtuosi, with Mahan Esfahani at the harpsichord and Lambert Orkis playing the violin-piano sets. There are whoops of appreciation between each number. Probably not from Mahan and Orkis.

So has the Ice Queen turned Club Queen? In some kind of psychedelic dream, maybe. Her playing is pluperfect, as ever, and her eagerness to engage comes over even in an audio recording. Most of the betweeny bits work rather well, especially the Debussy, but a send-home number of John Williams’s Schindler’s List theme, played at half the Perlman speed, is too much of a downer for hardcore clubbers. Ms Mutter may need to spend more time out on the scene.