Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is here at her commanding, warm-toned best! Sensitive, sensuous, soulful and soul-baring, ravishing and ravaged, the music enters your living-room with a vividness you may find overpowering. Mutter and Deutsche Grammophon's commitment to new repertoire is in itself cause for celebration. Mutter performs with conductor James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Berg's concerto offers a rich and highly personal blend of diverse musical features and autobiographical allusions. It is dedicated "to the memory of an angel" - Manon Gropius, who died at the age of 18 in April 1935. Several weeks before that tragic event Berg had been commissioned to write a concerto by the American violinist Louis Krasner. But it was the death of Manon, the daughter of Berg's friends Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler Gropius, that impelled him to compose the work, tearing him away from the orchestration of Lulu. As a result, the opera would remain incomplete.
Berg rejected the traditional, quasi-symphonic three-movement scheme favoured by 19th century concerto composers in favour of two subdivided parts, the first progressing from a gentle Andante to a more dance-like but still reflective Allegretto, the second balancing a turbulent Allegro which is an extended accompanied cadenza against a set of variations on the chorale which veers constantly between the spiritual and the sensual, between mourning and longing. Near the end, the markings "religioso" and "amoroso" occur simultaneously in different instrumental parts, and this sums up the extraordinary ambibalence as well as the disturbing emotional power of this remarkable work.
"In a 'chanted time' I find the unalterable forward movement of time and the absurd commentary of one who, while living in tiem, wants to make it satnad still, enclose it within the moment, lock it in the moment as if in the living rock - but as movement, energy, breathless but not rigid in death (Artaud's idea of betyl, the singing rock, or a simile that makes sense even musicologically: melos = nerves...). This calls for a medium with the virtuosic skill to make nerves and strands of thought audible, make them stand out from the immaterial configuration as palpable, sensual shapes." - Wolfgang Rihm
Tracklist:
Violinkonzert - Dem Andenken Eines Engels / Violin Concerto - To The Memory Of An Angel
A1 I. Andante - Allegretto 11:31
A2 II. Allegro - Adagio 16:12
»Gesungene Zeit« - Musik Für Violine Und Orchester / "Time Chant" - Music For Violin And Orchestra
B1 [Anfang / Beginning] 14:27
B2 [Takt 179 / Bar 179] 9:56
Composed By – Alban Berg (tracks: A1, A2), Wolfgang Rihm (tracks: B1, B2)
Orchestra – Chicago Symphony Orchestra
