Concert review: Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin) London Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès

I vividly recall the 2016 concert in which Anne-Sophie Mutter led the LSO and Thomas Adès on a merry dance through the Violin Concerto of Brahms. Apparently they enjoyed the experience, and in 2022 Adès wrote for her the Air which was being given its UK premiere on this occasion, alongside expertly prepared, abstractly theatrical accounts of Stravinsky’s last two ballets, Orpheus and Agon.

An extended aria rather than a concerto – as the title implies – Air is more prosaically a multilayered canon in the mould of the DNA-shaped staircases to heaven and hell that link up his Violin Concerto (2005) and Dante ballet (2019). Most of the work’s gradual harmonic movement takes place in a quietly teeming orchestral texture, linking English polyphonists to Ligeti and through to the ‘Homage to Sibelius’ indicated by the subtitle. Lavishing her trademark intensity of tone on its long, ecstatic lines, Mutter nonetheless sounded uncharacteristically reserved, beyond the mostly quiet dynamics of the score, and perhaps the piece would reward a more early-music-minded approach.

Before the interval, the Partita of Lutosławski made a rare treat – both to hear any of the composer’s music at all, and to find the violinist at her unassailable best. Orchestrating it for her back in 1988, Lutosławski drew out the Beethovenian qualities of struggle and opposition that run through his own output, and to which Mutter responded with undimmed commitment and a fiercely gleaming core to her tone.

PETER QUANTRILL