'There are a lot of notes flying around here.' Anne-Sophie Mutter, the world class violinist, talks to Arminta Wallace about the magic of Mozart.
Somehow, jazz is not the first word which springs to mind when one thinks of Anne-Sophie Mutter. She is undoubtedly one of the world's top classical violinists. She is almost certainly one of the world's best-dressed women. But a cool cat?
On the phone from her base in Germany, she laughs merrily. "Oh, I love jazz," she declares. Her English is bright, lilting and rat-a-tat rapid: soprano pizzicato. "Since I'm a small girl jazz has been a great passion in my life, and the kind of music I listen to - if I listen to any music at all - in my spare time." What is she listening to at the moment, then? "Oh, always the same," comes the reply. "Billie Holiday - such a sad, lonely voice. Good old famous Ella Fitzgerald. Oscar Peterson. And of course I listen to my husband when he plays jazz. That's really wonderful. Totally cool."
The husband in question is the conductor, composer and jazzman André Previn, to whom Mutter has been married for two years. It has been a high-profile partnership, not least because of the age difference between the two - she is 40, he 74 - but also because her recording of the violin concerto (classical, not jazz) he wrote for her, was recently nominated for a Grammy award.
At the moment, however, the man who is taking up most of Mutter's time and energy is Mozart. Her concert calendar for 2005/6 is a massive Mozartfest which consists of the piano trios, the five violin concerti, the Sinfonia Concertante and all 16 violin sonatas, on which she is working as we speak. "There are a lot of notes flying around here," she observes, with another tinkle of tuneful laughter.
The intensity of this encounter with Mozart's music has, she says, been a revelation. "You know, I've been living with the concerti since I started my musical career in Salzburg in 1977. So that's quite a while ago. And some of the sonatas have also been in my recital repertoire. But it is a totally different mountain to climb if you are preparing nearly all of the important sonatas he has ever written - because they cover all the periods of his life. The concerti were written in a time span of 1½ years, and that's it. But the sonatas range over all of Mozart's life, from the early years in Mannheim to his last years in Vienna. And so they are connected with other pieces - the operas, the other concerti and the great symphonies - which puts everything into a sort of puzzle, a general perspective.
"Also, for a violinist, the sonatas are full of stories and links to other great masters. Two of the five sonatas which we will play in Dublin were dedicated to great violinists, Antonio Brunetti and a woman called Regina Primasacchi, whom Mozart met in 1784. A woman - quite extraordinary for a virtuoso of that time. Both of those sonatas were actually performed without a written-out piano part. So you had Mozart sitting at the piano, improvising the accompaniment as they went along.
"Imagine the stress level. Much as I would have loved to meet him, I'm not quite certain if I would have survived that experience - leaning over the shoulder of the composer and trying to read what he has scribbled down."
Mutter, by contrast, will be in the company of her long-time recital partner, Lambert Orkis. Not that sparks don't occasionally fly in this partnership as well, as she points out. Orkis is a celebrated fortepianist and harpsichordist, as well as an internationally recognised pianist.
"We have a different opinion on these pieces in the sense that Lambert is very much into playing on original instruments," Mutter says. "And now I have become interested in this as well. In the year Wolfgang Amadeus was born, 1756, his father, Leopold Mozart, published a textbook which introduced the Italian virtuoso style of playing to the rest of Europe. And I tell you, up to this day that book is amazing because it analyses everything there is in violin playing and violin technique.
"What I found quite interesting is the fact that vibrato - which he called Italian tremolo - was used more than we realise. He explains how often you should actually vibrate per note. Then, in the middle of the century, the bowmakers changed the shape of the bow in search of more flexibility, and probably also of more nuances. So one shouldn't nail down the so-called "original" way of playing these pieces, totally without vibrato and totally without dynamics. Going back to the letters of Mozart, what he loved were musicians who played with emotion and incredible tonal beauty.
"Anyhow," she concludes, "Lambert has his opinion and I have mine and somewhere in the middle, you know, this is a very fruitful collaboration."
If the immersion in Mozart has added another layer to Mutter's understanding of his music, her frequent forays into contemporary and new music have added another.
"When I'm doing contemporary music," she says, "I learn about different sound colours - or even about how to read and understand better orchestral scores. The more you learn, the more you know - and unfortunately, the more you know, the more you realise you don't know."
MUTTER, SURELY, KNOWS more than most, having recorded a four-CD survey of 20th-century violin concerti and premiered works by leading composers. "Well," she says, "I've always been accused of having a very classical taste in contemporary music - and that's true. I always try to find music which still speaks to me and therefore, also, I'm able to speak to the audience through the music. Every great composer has a pattern in the sense that there's logic behind what they write - and in every great contemporary composer there's a style you recognise."
In this, she says, it is no different to the music of Mozart and Beethoven. "The beauty of their music mirrors the very tragic moments in both their lives; something which is incredibly touching because they were able to convert pain into something divinely beautiful.
"There is also, of course," she adds tartly, "contemporary music which turns the audience off and which turns the musicians off. But for musicians, despite the fact that pieces by Boulez and Lutoslawski are terribly difficult to learn, they do give enormous pleasure to play because there is a human quality in the music."
Mutter is currently awaiting delivery of a new concerto, Anthemes III, from Pierre Boulez. Aren't his scores notorious for their visual - let alone musical - complexity?
"Oh, yeah," she exclaims. "Oh, my God. Mine is in the pipeline. I just received a letter from him announcing that the date we had for the premiere next April cannot hold because he has too much to do. Which gives me a few years of still hoping that I can play it. Being confronted with a score of Boulez . . . uh, oh. I'm in danger of suiciding myself."
A concerto from Sofia Gubaidulina, whose premiere is planned for 2007, is apparently a less daunting prospect. "She's highly, highly, highly charged with emotions - and she's a very dramatic composer. That's why I love her writing so much. Especially for the voice of the strings, her writing is just exceptional, and I'm sure this is going to be another important and great piece for the repertoire of every fiddle player. I'm very confident I'll get the score by spring next year, which will give me, for once, enough time to learn it."
IT SEEMS ODD to hear a violinist of Mutter's class and experience place so much emphasis on learning, on re-evaluating, on the importance of surprise. But she is adamant that music - like life - is a voyage of discovery.
"I recently had a conversation with Lynn Harrell, the famous cellist, whom I admire enormously," she says. "We play often together and we are great friends. He mentioned to me - and I thought I am the only person who has had this experience - that sometimes he finds, in pieces he has been playing for 25 years, details he had not realised were there. And this is quite exceptional; to hear such a great musician say that you are never finished with studying. There is always something to develop."
With this in mind she is highly involved in training the next generation of young musicians through her Freundeskreis Anne-Sophie Mutter Stiftung (Anne-Sophie Mutter Circle of Friends Foundation), which offers scholarships, tutoring, audition CDs and even specially commissioned new pieces to gifted young string players.
"This is a new and rather exciting activity for us," she says. "At the moment we have a double bass player who is 20 years old and a total genius - I mean, you know, this is Paganini reborn - but there's basically no repertoire for him to play. The double bass is maybe not everybody's favourite instrument to write for. But it just takes a few great composers to write really good pieces for the instrument to be more exposed. And then we'll have a generation of great bass players."
True to Mutter's musical philosophy, the foundation tries to favour students who have that indefinable "musical-goosebump" factor over those who are merely technically proficient. "Obviously I'm not looking for somebody who is playing only slick," she says. "But the work for me also is quite challenging because what I'm realising, after many years, is that there's only so much help you can give. There is quite a lot in music which is unteachable, unforeseeable and unpredictable. Which sometimes is frustrating, because there are great talents out there which will never make it."
Are we talking psychology here, or temperament, or something more spiritual? "It has," says Mutter, after an uncharacteristic pause, "something to do with whether you really want to play for the audience. There are a couple of really gifted people out there who sort of play for themselves. And that's not something you want to listen to, because it doesn't include the listener. Something has to travel from the stage to the audience. As an artist, you have to give."
Few, it must be said, give more than Mutter.
Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis play a programme of Mozart sonatas at the National Concert Hall in Dublin tonight