Anne-Sophie Mutter, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, James Levine - Berg: Violin Concerto, Rihm: Time Chant (1992)

Berg's Violin Concerto (1935) is considered by many the most accessible and emotionally engaging piece of music in the atonal idiom. His last completed work, the concerto was written as a memorial "to an angel" upon the premature death of Alma Mahler's daughter Manon Gropius. But as with all of Berg's oeuvre, an autobiography of the composer's inner life is also thoroughly woven into the score. From the deeply reflective nuances of its quiet opening, Anne-Sophie Mutter takes the listener into the heart of Berg's ambiguous lyricism. There's a keen grasp, both by soloist and conductor James Levine, of the work's intricate structure and progression, but never at the price of a coldly disengaged intellectualism. Mutter summons a marvelous array of shadings and colors, effecting a truly haunting impression as tonality makes its ghostlike apparition, first in the guise of a folk song and, in the final part--following a violent cataclysm rendered with fiery power--in the variations on a quote from a chorale by Bach. Throughout, Mutter's intuitive realization of the psychic journey traced by Berg reveals the work's significance as closer in spirit to a requiem of farewell than a traditional concerto.
Mutter's command of an animated tone that pulsates with expressive purpose inspired the contemporary German composer Wolfgang Rihm to write the other work on this disc, Gesungene Zeit ("Time Chant"). It's a mesmerizing neoexpressionist poem of shimmering, elongated string lines--later punctuated with dire eruptions from full orchestra--that seem to form an ether over which the soloist floats. Any sense of time measured in bars becomes negated as Mutter intones Siren-like threads of sound in the highest register. As with the Penderecki Violin Concerto No. 2 and other contemporary works she champions, Mutter plays with a gripping immediacy that indeed makes Rihm's imaginative novelty seem tailor-made for her. -- Thomas May