The star power burned brightly

Saturday afternoon at the Kennedy Center, where violin virtuoso and celebrity Anne-Sophie Mutter held court before a nearly-full Concert Hall audience who loudly demanded and received four encores after the three programmed Beethoven sonatas.  

​Mutter belongs to the “one percenters” in the classical music world; those who started as seeds with a unique combination of innate physical, emotional, and intellectual gifts, were potted in a soil of nurturing family support and ideal teaching, sprouted when the time was right and when influential figures made things happen for them, and then bloomed into fullest beauty under the sometimes harsh sunlight of early fame. Her cohort includes Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Evgeny Kissin, and Hilary Hahn, all of whom seemed to arrive fully-formed, never referred to as “promising talents” but rather as formidable artistic forces from the beginning.     

​Mutter began her extensive recording career at age 15 at the very pinnacle of the profession -- with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic -- and has remained there for four decades. She has not coasted along playing the standard canon either, commissioning and recording many new works by Previn, Lutoslawski, Rihm, Penderecki, Williams, Gubaidulina, and Dutilleux, and setting up a foundation to promote the careers of promising young artists.

​All this, plus her movie-star looks and designer gowns (always with bare shoulders) make each performance an event. Despite the unimaginative programming -- who cares that Beethoven was born 250 years ago? Don’t we hear his fiddle sonatas enough as it is? Did you know you can get a high-quality DVD of her playing all ten Beethoven sonatas for a quarter of what you paid for a ticket yesterday? – Mutter’s playing was anything but routine, the artist’s legendary concentration drawing us into the most intimate exchanges with pianist Lambert Orkis and her still-flawless technique dispatching the Brahms encore with irresistible panache. 

​And “irresistible” is the thing here; just as absolute power corrupts, Mutter’s iconic status creates a kind of alchemy, whereby waywardness of pulse, inconsistency of articulation, and altering of the composer’s clear instructions becomes a higher artistic plane rather than an irritant (as they would in anyone else’s hands). Her tics of slowing down for lyrical sections, stopping vibrato when playing pianissimo, taking continuous liberties with tempos (glaringly so in codas), and playing repeated passages with entirely different note-lengths and emphases makes a listener weary, if not dizzy. But since we’re in the presence of greatness, it all becomes part of the celebrity package, Beethoven’s vision becoming secondary. What happened to the big exposition repeat in the “Kreutzer” sonata?  What happened to the many subito pianos in the “Spring” sonata? You can’t help but admire her grandeur as a performer (queenly posture, everything memorized), but what comes out is sort of “Beethoven-plus,” like a modern re-make of a classic film.  

​I bow down to Mutter as a violinist; and whatever she’s been doing has got her where she is today. For communing with Beethoven’s genius, one should look elsewhere, but Saturday’s adoring crowd got what it came for.  

The concert was presented by Washington Performing Arts.