Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Penderecki: Violin Concerto no 2; etc / Mutter, P...
For me, there has always been only one violinist god, Jascha Heifetz, but he did not record everything--particularly what has been written since he put down his bow. (That bow, incidentally, is now wielded by Maxim Vengerov, who, I think, is the most exciting violinist performing today.). Over the course of the last few decades Anne-Sophie Mutter has occupied the position as the world's best current violinist in my ranking, but seems to have lost her way (as has Vengerov). One aspect of her career that counts a lot for me is that she championed new work, particularly the violin concerti by Witold Lutoslawski and the second Penderecki one. Vengerov has recorded (sensationally!) some of the major early 20th-century violin concerti,. but neither in person nor on disc have I heard him play anything new (anything written in the last 50+ years. (With no recent butcherings of core repertoire, Joshua Bell has less risen to the top than his competitors have fallen off it--and Bell has championed some new music, particularly John Corigliano's concerto based on "The Red Violin.")
I don't have any recording of the Lutoslawski with which to compare Mutter's performance, but in that both her Penderecki and Lutoslawski recordings had the composers and conductors and they dedicated the works to her, they have more than provisional authority. I do have a recording of Chee-Yun playing the Penderecki with the Polich National Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Antoni Wit, which seems somewhat warmer and fuller-bodied to me (if less virtuosic).
I listened to three discs of Penderecki orchestral music (including five symphonies, the middle three of which I actually found myself liking*) before trying to review "Metamorphosen" (the second Penderecki violin concerto). From that exercise, I learned that after moving away from serial/atonal compositions, Penderecki has been thinking in 30-40 minute chunks--that is what he conceives as a single movement without breaks. (Fortunately, CD makers break up these monoliths--into six parts for "Metamorphosen.").
The concerto for Mutter (which she premiered with the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1995) runs 38 minutes in the composer's recording. Unlike works such as "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" that made Penderecki's avant-garde reputation, "Metamorphosen" is melodic. It is not easily accessible, but it is not inaccessible, either. And, as Mutter herself notes, the composition has "extreme technical demands," and not just the cadenza in the fifth part (some of which sounds twittering to me; other parts strike me as doodling with gruff double-stop sawings and pizzicati, though the eventual re-entry of the orchestra is fairly exciting, though it quickly sinks from mania to soft and low depression and an aching bridge to the final part). The brief (2-minute) fourth section also seems arbitrary to me (though, perhaps, it has a point that I miss; it resembles some of Shostakovich's sarcastic flights).
Like Penderecki's symphonies 2-5, the somber and frequently rhapsodic music calls Shostakovich to mind (particularly the very agitated fifth section and the heavy lifting at the start of the third). The first times I heard the piece, there was nothing that I particularly liked until the sixth (final) section, but I have come to admire the bildung of the first section—which provides the foundation for the still brooding but quite beautiful "Andante con moto" finale. Some have heard this as a burial. Although it was completed on Easter (1995), it would be hard to hear it as proclaiming any resurrection (or The Resurrection). The violin sings in its upper registers, but very plaintively, with lightly scored, mysterious orchestral bass, fading away on a sustained high note.
I certainly wish that Mutter and Penderecki had also recorded his first violin concerto (premiered by and dedicated to Isaac Stern). Or, if not that, another work for violin and orchestra. The rest of the disc contains the unusually bright and sunny second Sontata for Violin and Piano by Bela Bartok (in C-Major, a key I doubt that Penderecki has ever written anything in! and not one typical of Bartok either, for that matter). The violin part is recurrently playful (almost silly in the plucking at the start of the second movement), though it becomes rhapsodic, with dense chords from the piano (Bartok was the pianist at the first performance in 1923 in Berlin).
Pianist Lambert Orkis plays very well, as does Mutter (this used to go without saying!). There is no break between the opening slow movement and fast final one. The running time of the sonata is 20 minutes (the disc's 58 minutes). I find the Bartok quite enjoyable; the Penderecki is winning me over with repeated exposure.
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