Search - Ludwig van Beethoven, Herbert von Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra :: Beethoven: Violin Concerto

By and large, Karajan's studio recordings with concerto soloists were not among his most important achievements on disc. This is not to belittle the distinguished artists he accompanied, who included the pianists Dinu Lipatti, Walter Gieseking, Sviatoslav Richter, Géza Anda, Alexis Weissenberg and Yevgeny Kissin, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the violinist Christian Ferras. However, those partnerships rarely extended beyond a single project (sometimes involving several works), with one major exception: the first female German violinist of international standing, Anne-Sophie Mutter. She became his devoted collaborator, their recordings of major violin concertos being made over 11 years. The story of her discovery by Karajan is already legendary: how in 1976 the 13-year-old girl from Wehr near the German-Swiss border auditioned for the famous conductor, who listened raptly to her playing of the entire Bach Chaconne and movements from two Mozart concertos, and promptly invited her to play the Mozart works in Salzburg the following year under his direction. A best-selling recording followed and Deutsche Grammophon executives were impatient for another. But Mutter refused to be rushed, claiming she could learn only one concerto per year, so this, her second recording, was scheduled for late 1979. It is an unusually spacious Beethoven Concerto, but, as the Penguin Guide writes: "the slow basic tempi of Anne-Sophie Mutter's beautiful reading on Deutsche Grammophon were her own choice, she claims, and certainly not forced on her by her super-star conductor. [...] The purity of the solo playing and the concentration of the whole performance make the result intensely convincing."