Tag: Album Review

Two superstars and prodigies

Anne-Sophie Mutter, for those of us who are old enough to remember, was a classical music  prodigy. Herbert von Karajan put her on the map when he performed a Mozart violin concerto with her in 1977, when she was 13. Anne-Sophie Mutter was a major star for the Deutsche Grammphon label in the 1980s and 90s.

I must admit I never very much liked her early recordings, to my ears they suffered from the same problem as Karajan´s late work on DG, just too much of everything. However, in recent years, Mutter style has evolved significantly, and her recent recordings, e.g. her 2013 recording of the Dvorak concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic, or her 2008 recording of the Bach violin concertos with the Trondheim Soloists show a very different Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Daniil Trifonov (born in 1991) started a tiny bit later, winning third price in the Chopin competition in 2010, and winning some major competitions one year later. Since then, he has released some fantastic albums, e.g. his great Rachmaninov album in 2015, or his recent Liszt Transcedental Etudes, all justify that he was named “Artist of the year” by Gramophone in 2016. Deutsche Grammophon (or whatever is left of it within the big Universal Music Group conglomerate) clearly still has a good taste in selecting musicians.

Schubert: Forellenquintett – Anne-Sophie Mutter – Daniel Trifonov (Deutsche Grammophon 2017)

I’ve written quite a bit how much I love Schubert´s Chamber music (see here and here for my favorite versions of the string quintet, or an article here about the Rosamunde quartet), but so far I’ve never mentioned the Forellen or Trout piano quintet.

I really don’t know why, but somehow this work never ranked as highly in my personal scale as the pure string chamber works. Silly, I know, it is truly beautiful.

Before we go into the album itself, who else do we have here beyond our two super stars? I must admit I had never heard the names of Hwayoon Lee (viola), Maximilian Hornung (cello), and Roman Patkoló (double bass) before. And even the booklet of the album doesn’t bother to give any more information about them. After some googling it turns out all of them are young musicians that Hornung and Lee both are being developed by Anne-Sophie Mutters Young Talent foundation. Patkoló himself is currently a professor in Basle and has played with Mutter beforehand.

So what do we get here?

This album is the result of a live recording in Baden-Baden in June 2017. And you really feel the energy of a live event. There is passion, drive, and pleasure in every single movement of the Trout. Sometimes, when you have musicians that are not playing in a regular ensemble do chamber music, there is a risk of the music not being fully coherent.

This is not the case here, while Mutter and Trifonov are clearly the stars, all of the instruments merge smoothly in this adventure.

On top of the Trout, you get the Notturno for piano, violin, and cello D897, one of my absolute favorite Schubert works, and some song adaptations for violin and piano, including the famous Schwanengesang.

The only thing I´d have to criticize is that sometimes Mutter (and to some extent also Trifonov) seem to fall back into what I didn’t like about the early recordings, i.e. a bit too much of everything, a bit too much drama and vibrato, where I´d personally prefer even more intimacy (e.g. in the Notturno).

But overall, this is a very enjoyable album.

My rating: 4 stars

You can find it here (Qobuz) and here (HDtracks)

UPDATE Feb 28, 2018: It took Classica a while to review this, and the result isn’t pretty: 1 star, doesn’t get worse than this. They criticize the focus on Mutter and Trifonov and a lack of coherence.