United States Various: Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin), Lambert Orkis (piano). San Francisco Symphony Great Performers Series, Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, 6.4.2025. (HS)
Mozart – Violin Sonata No.18 in G major
Schubert – Fantasy in C major for Violin and Piano
Clara Schumann – Three Romances for Violin and Piano
Aftab Darvishi – Likoo
Respighi – Violin Sonata in B minor
Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist Lambert Orkis have been delivering elegant recitals together since 1988, and their musical linkage was one of the strong points in a wide-ranging recital at Davies Symphony Hall. What was missing, surprisingly, was the energy and precision expected from this much-exalted musical pairing.
A quote featured on Mutter’s website proclaims, ‘Music should grip people, move people, it should tell stories, it should have an impact’. The program of a light-hearted Mozart sonata, an extroverted Schubert fantasy, Clara Schumann Romances and an expansive Respighi sonata certainly promised all of that, but the only piece that really delivered the goods was a brand-new piece for solo violin commissioned by Mutter.
Likoo by Aftab Darvishi, Iranian-born and educated in Tehran and the Netherlands, received its world premiere by Mutter only the previous Thursday at Carnegie Hall in New York. In this, its third performance, it made an extraordinarily profound impression. Familiar violin gestures, clear melody and harmony created a carefully framed lament within the framework of a traditional Iranian modal form called ‘Likoo’, which is often used to express grief.
Darvishi, a trained violinist herself, made expert use of Mutter’s virtuosity. Her music touched on echoes of Bach, especially in the layering of arpeggios with melodies moving underneath in breathtaking clarity. There are also hints of composers such as Tchaikovsky and Sibelius who made expert use of Romantic expressionism. At its heart, it adds up to a new and fascinating voice.
The piece told a story in five minutes. Even without knowing the composer’s inspiration – the women lost in the September 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran – the mournful embrace of this memory is present. Darvishi starts the music with a simple, hesitant line. It gains momentum in a virtuosic middle section and recedes into a heart-wrenching high pianissimo note that fades to nothing at the end. It is hard to hold back tears.
Among the other women composers Mutter has championed over her career is Clara Schumann, whose Three Romances was inspired by and dedicated to the great Joseph Joachim. These are charming pieces, but the matter-of-fact, note-perfect presentation by Mutter and Orkis which preceded Likoo in the second half of the concert, did not find much else in these, the composer’s only works for violin and piano.
The first half began with Mozart’s Violin Sonata No.18 in G major, in which the piano does the heavy lifting and the violin part darts in and out with witty commentary in the two brief movements. Mutter’s intonation was not as perfect as it usually is, and Orkis never quite settled into Mozart’s lively rhythms.
Intonation was hit-and-miss in the other first-half piece, Schubert’s Fantasy in C major (especially in the violin’s midrange, although notes high on the fingerboard hit the bullseye again and again). This long, late-Schubert piece, its four movements played without pause, can overstay its welcome, and iffy intonation did not help. The piano tuner came out to fix the concert grand at intermission, so maybe that was the issue.
The other big piece was Respighi’s Violin Sonata in B minor which concluded the program. Like the works that immediately preceded it, its music is darkly shaded. Not only was it written in 1917, in the late stages of World War I, the composer was in mourning after the death of his mother. The brooding first movement found a welcome single-mindedness from the musicians, a unity of approach that rode the waves of emotions into an often-gripping presence. Fascinatingly, Mutter and Orkis shaded the style of each of the 18 variations distinctly in the surprisingly jaunty finale, a passacaglia in form but livelier than most examples of the Baroque versions.
Mutter played the entire concert from memory, and only used a music stand for the new Likoo. Even the three encores were done sans score for the soloist, the best being the final one, John Williams’s ‘Nice to Be Around’ from his score to an all-but forgotten 1973 film, Cinderella Liberty. Williams wrote dozens of transcriptions of his music for this violinist, not to mention a violin concerto. Mutter played it like a sweet soft-jazz ballad, and Orkis laid a lovely background.
Orkis was a bit slow on the uptake in following Mutter’s stylish lead in the first two encores – an appropriately exotic rendition of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No.1 and Fritz Kreisler’s fragrant, slow-waltz ‘Caprice Viennois’.
Harvey Steiman