Anne-Sophie Mutter paid tribute to her long-time friend and collaborator John Williams at the Royal Festival Hall, with reimaginings of movie score classics across five decades and a recent violin concerto that didn’t quite hit the mark.
The evening kicked off with Hollywood promise as the London Philharmonic Orchestra hurtled through the Superman March, with Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s exciting young Music Director Jonathon Heyward conducting with fervour, as he did throughout the evening.
However, the night was designed to be a showcase for Williams’ love affair with the violin, with German superstar Mutter performing the UK premiere of his Violin Concerto no. 2, written by the now 91-year-old “great master” for her during the pandemic. Unfortunately, the concerto is bulky, with little of the pizzazz we have come to expect from the composer.
To be fair to Williams, he had told us in the programme notes that he could “only think of this piece as being about Anne-Sophie Mutter, and the violin itself”. And she did show her skills as a virtuoso in those 45 minutes, moving from frantic bars heavy with articulation to long anguished film noir lyricism in multiple solo passages that felt almost improvised in free rhythms.
But the piece is so skewed towards the violin as to be indulgent and emotionally one-dimensional, with very little in the way of nuance or even dynamic change except in the few percussive moments that finally give the orchestra something to do. Occasionally the LPO was engaged and the music swelled as though going somewhere... and then it didn’t. An ongoing duet between Mutter and Sue Blair on the harp short-changed Blair, and with Williams being well-known for his motifs, it was hard to find any here.
Returning to the safer ground of Hollywood, Mutter took us through some film favourites, as reimagined for her collaboration with Williams on the 2019 album Across the Stars. A playful duel from The Adventures of Tintin perked the hall back up after the interval, and elegant controlled lines in Cinderella Liberty and The Long Goodbye displayed Mutter’s mastery of grace on her instrument.
A soft excerpt from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and a violin-centric rewrite of Hedwig’s Theme from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone gave the audience some of the blockbuster hits it was looking for, with Mutter lending high drama to the latter in energetic solo bridges between the main themes. Introducing a “silent prayer” for lives lost across the world, Mutter sensitively and delicately delivered the theme from Schindler’s List to a pin-drop atmosphere.
With the concert now two hours in and Mutter having left, it was initially hard to see why Heyward and the LPO would finish with Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic suite from the 1955 Marlon Brando movie On the Waterfront – and you could forgive the audience members who left before it started. However, it was a gloriously played and exciting suite that unfortunately shone a stark light on Williams’ concerto. Here were nuances of light and dark, here was textural variety, and here was an uplifting finish to a night at the movies.
