Album

This 1979 recording of Beethoven's Violin Concerto was only the second recoding of the then 16-year-old German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. Like her first recording, a coupling of Mozart's Third and Fifth violin concertos from 1978, it was made for Deutsche Grammophon and featured the Berliner Philharmoniker under the baton of Herbert von Karajan, the conductor who discovered Mutter. It is a willfully individualistic performance, but no less beautiful for it. Mutter favored expansive tempos: few other recordings of the work, including Mutter's own later recordings, dare to take nearly 27 minutes for the opening Allegro ma non troppo. But such is Mutter's interpretive intensity, not to mention her opulent tone and immaculate technique, that the movement, indeed, the whole work, plays much shorter than it is. Karajan and the Berlin players are uniquely suited to this approach; Karajan had perfected the "beauty above everything" approach to orchestral sound long before Mutter was born. The performance is recorded in cool, clean stereo and superbly remastered using original image bit-processing.

© James Leonard, All Music Guide

CD 1
Ludwig van Beethoven Composer Violin Concerto in D, Op.61 Work 48:19 Herbert von Karajan Conductor, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Anne-Sophie Mutter Violin
1	1.Allegro ma non troppo	26:34			$3.99
2	2.Larghetto	11:24			$1.99
3	3.Rondo: Allegro	10:21			$1.99