Anne-Sophie Mutter on East Meets West

German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter has long been an ardent advocate of commissioning new works, giving the world premieres of pieces by composers as diverse as Wolfgang Rihm, André Previn, Witold Lutosławski, and many more.

To celebrate this rich history, in association with Alpha Classics she has launched ASM Forte Forward, a series dedicated to performing some of these compositions, many of which will be receiving their premiere recordings. The first instalment has just been released, featuring music by Jörg Widmann, Thomas Adès, Unsuk Chin, and Aftab Darvishi. I spoke to Anne-Sophie about the new album, as well as her recent collaboration with John Williams on his Violin Concerto No. 2, and how her interest in commissioning new compositions came about.

The theme of your series is works that you have commissioned. Before we discuss your new album specifically, last time we spoke was about your collaboration with John Williams, Across the Stars, and since then he has written his Violin Concerto No. 2 for you. How did that come about?

The violin concerto became my lifeline during COVID. Because of our collaborations on Across the Stars and then his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic, which also resulted in an album in January of 2020, he had already had the idea of writing a violin concerto. He was of course always terribly busy in the film industry, but then COVID hit and suddenly the great master had time on his hands. During the months of him being isolated in California and me in Munich, these emails and occasional packages with music manuscripts were something to look forward to, and they became a light at the end of the tunnel. It was over the course of one year that he sent me material, and I was always very grateful and excited.

The concerto evolved around our shared love for jazz: in Across the Stars there is a jazzy theme called Nice to Be Around from Cinderella Liberty, which I really have a soft spot for. I remember when we went through all the pieces before recording them, I kept Cinderella until the very end, and I was the least confident playing that for him because I was aware that this style was not something I had played before. Although having been a great admirer of jazz and being married to André Previn I felt comfortable in loving and appreciating jazz, being from the Black Forest is about as far away from New Orleans as you can get! I felt a little self-conscious, but apparently André months before had reassured John, "she can do anything, don't worry". As I was playing I could see that John was not yelling at me or screaming, he seemed to be relatively positively surprised.

He started his life as a pianist and jazz musician, and the stem cell of the concerto revolves around Claude Thornhill, an arranger and jazz musician of the last century, with certain chords that John quotes. It starts with a reflective improvisando harp solo, and then the violin takes over in the same kind of fluid, searching musical idea. It’s one of the great violin concertos, and has become one of my repertoire pieces. 

Obviously, commissioning new pieces is important to you. Do you remember the very first piece that was written with you in mind?

I grew up at the foot of the Black Forest where France, Switzerland and Germany meet, and Switzerland was actually the country of choice when it came to going to concerts because it was the closest. Basel, where the great conductor and mentor of composers Paul Sacher lived, was about twenty minutes by car, and my second and main violin teacher, Aida Stucki, was friends with him. As a teenager I used to be invited there, where I met Wolfgang Rihm and Witold Lutosławski, of course in a very brief manner, but I was familiar with them.

Then out of the blue in August 1985, Paul told me, "by the way, I have asked Lutosławski to write a piece for you, and here's the score!" The premiere was in January 1986, which felt very close. I was frightened because I had never played a piece by a living composer and my musical training had pretty much stopped with the repertoire of the 1930s, so I never really had a love for contemporary music. I guess Paul sensed that lack of interest and intellectual development, and he just confronted me. Would you say no to Paul? Of course not. So I met Witold under the serious circumstance of having to play Chain 2 for him. 

In the sixties he had invented a style of composing, with strict “a battuta” movements contrasting with interludes titled “ad libitum”, which was a kind of organised improvisation. He would have the music written out, but it was up to the soloist with the help of the conductor to decide when to start a certain segment, how often you would repeat that segment, and when the others would come in, so within that framework was a feeling of improvisation. I thought that was a genius invention. That opened the door to this universe, and from then on I was hooked, because the excitement of playing and hearing a piece for the very first time when you stand in front of the orchestra is like traveling to space. And since then, I love my space voyages!

You mentioned when John Williams was writing the concerto that he would send you material. Do you like to see drafts as it goes along, or are you normally presented with a finished piece?

I'm usually left alone with the finished piece. There has been only one case of me studying it, going back to the composer and asking for rewrites. But usually I leave the composer in peace: they write what they think needs to be written, and then I struggle alone! 

That brings me to one of the pieces on your new album, Unsuk Chin’s Gran Cadenza for two violins. I heard you say that when you first saw it, you thought it must have been for flutes rather than violins because it was nearly impossible. Have there been times when you've had to say, sorry, this is not possible on the violin? And how do you begin to approach such phenomenally difficult scores?

It’s rarely the case that a composer makes a mistake in terms of not really honouring the register of the violin, for example writing lower than the G-string, things which physically are not possible (although it did happen in the case of Penderecki’s La Follia!). But you just struggle through it! I remember when Ye-Eun Choi and I were trying to get through Gran Cadenza, it was terrible… Just finding the proper notes was out of reach, and it was so unviolinistic. To be honest, that evening I went into my wine cellar: I'm not into drinking, but sometimes a glass of red wine helps to ease your frustration! But on a more serious note, you just get at it: you try to identify patterns where the stress of a phrase is, you try to find the joy, and it just takes time. 

I believe you said wearing your dress helped because it meant you could beat time underneath it with your foot?

Yes, that's true: there was a certain passage where we were really desperate to know where the pulse was, and that was our secret weapon in moments of panic!

When you mentioned composers writing notes that are too low for the violin, I was reminded of Richard Strauss writing low G flats for the violins in Ein Heldenleben! And also Beethoven’s comment to the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh when the latter complained about something being too hard, along the lines of “Am I supposed to think about your wretched fiddle when the spirit moves me?”

Perfectly true! And also with Strauss, when the horns complained it was too high, he just said, "I write it and you play it!" I think throughout music history that’s the only way you can improve people's perception of their instrument and their abilities. You can only progress as a human being if you have set your goals high and if you struggle. There's a certain beauty in the struggle because after that comes the arrival on the mountain peak. But then you might realise there's another mountain, so off you go to struggle again! And with Unsuk, she doesn't write for a specific instrument, which philosophically I understand, but it's terribly impractical for us musicians. 

With all of these pieces you've had written for you, why was now the right time to launch your new series, Forte Forward, and how did you find your home on Alpha Classics? 

As I get older (which is way better than dying young…), I just felt there's not all that much time left, so I had better get on with it! This has been a dream project of mine for many years, but you know how it is with musical dreams, they can take years to organise and to find partners you want to joyfully work with. Alpha is a relatively young label that is very keen on contemporary music, and I met people who are really fired up. I believe in the necessity to record contemporary music because what is not recorded does not really exist. We brought things together last June, and I'm very happy that it was possible to involve wonderful scholars from my foundation, whose work goes back almost thirty years and helps young string players worldwide.

Not only does my foundation commission works like the Ringtone Variations by Sebastian Currier (which will be part of our first American Tunes album coming soon), but such great musicians like the Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández [who performs on the new album] have been part of it, and I felt it was important to showcase the young generation’s connection to contemporary music, to give them an outlet to present themselves and to become integrated into the canon of the more popular musicians. 

You open this album with Likoo, a solo violin piece by the Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi. Especially with everything that's going on in Iran at the moment, it’s an incredibly moving, poignant work. How did you first come across her music?

Yes, it is heart-wrenching that we live in times in which Likoo must stand as a memorial for all the innocent people lost in Iran in the uprising of the people against the regime, but now also in this terrible raging war. I came across Aftab in an article in the German newspaper, Die Zeit. She was talking about her childhood in Iran and her father, who like Béla Bartók collected folk tunes from the regions around Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, which is very important because that's like an encyclopedia for her as a young composer. She went to the Netherlands to study music and I was intrigued to read about her life story, remembering the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 with all the tragic killings.

I tracked her down and listened to her first album, A Thousand Butterflies, particularly Sahar, the solo cello piece, which is for live cello and recorded cello. I found it very haunting and I just knew that she could write a very special piece for solo violin. We met up in Dortmund in 2023, and we were initially thinking about something with pre-recorded violin, like a duet. But then I decided against it just because of practicality: I asked for something I could play any time, anywhere, without having to deal with gadgets. I wanted to have a piece of mourning and remembrance, not knowing that whilst recording it last summer, Israel would attack Iran, or that a year later it would be much worse even than that, and that this piece would become a living memorial for a system that is so inhuman. 

Aside from Sebastian Currier’s Ringtone Variations for violin and double bass you mentioned earlier, are you able to share anything about future volumes and the composers we might hear? 

Volume One of American Tunes will also feature the beautiful Second Violin Concerto by André Previn, as well as his Piano Trio. And then there will be American Tunes Part Two, which will include André’s The Fifth Season and the amazing Ghost Trio by Sebastian Currier. Hopefully we will also be able to record another Iranian composer Golfam Khayam’s Triple Concerto. So there is a lot of stuff going on, and with Forte Forward I'm excited to have found an outlet where we can do it.