East Meets West
Works by Aftab Darvishi, Unsuk Chin, Jörg Widmann, Beethoven et al
Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin), Nancy Zhou et al; London Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès
Alpha ALPHA1244 61 mins
Many composers have been commissioned to write for Anne-Sophie Mutter over the years, and this beautifully conceived album features four of them.
Likoo, by the Iranian-Dutch composer Aftab Darvishi, shows the inevitable influence of unaccompanied Bach in its opening double stops, and strings of arpeggios keep that world firmly in focus; but there’s also a more flexible melodic character, influenced by the songs of Balochistan.
Mutter’s performance has all the passion and accuracy that you might expect, and she’s matched by Nancy Zhou in Unsuk Chin’s Gran Cadenza, where the two players sometimes co-operate, sometimes try to outdo each other, with ‘conflict, dialogue and fusion’, as the composer says, creating a kaleidoscopic alternation of virtuosity and tenderness.
In Jörg Widmann’s quartet Studie über Beethoven you could play ‘spot-the-quote’ with the many references, some fleeting, some more overt, in its half-hour span. But what comes across most strongly is the bursting of barriers – tonal, rhythmic, technical - in a homage to Beethoven’s exuberant imagination, stretching all the players to their limits, with little chance for any of them to relax in its generally restless, sometimes violent progress.
We’re in a completely different world for Thomas Adès’s Air – Homage to Sibelius. It’s a sustained, lyrical cantilena, with Mutter’s violin climbing to the top of its range, over a procession of descending scales in the orchestra, until a partial descent in the final section. To describe it as hypnotic would be to short-change its gripping power, and, like all the works on the album, it’s superbly played, and recorded.
