Every violinist needs a good pianist. For Anne-Sophie Mutter, that partner is Lambert Orkis.
Over 37 years of collaboration, the duo has conquered the classics — the complete Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms sonatas — in addition to promoting lesser-known works by 20th-century composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and George Crumb. Mutter and Orkis have concertized prolifically. And in an increasingly diffuse performing arts landscape, they still draw a crowd, judging by Sunday’s well-attended performance at Davies Symphony Hall.
The programming may not have been groundbreaking, but the playing was plenty fresh.
Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 18 in G Major, K. 301, was spirited and rather more adventurous than even the duo’s exemplary 2006 recording. Mutter isn’t afraid to experiment with her sound, and her chords were alternately beautiful and brusque, her accompanying eighth notes pecked as if impatiently. Orkis’s phrasing was more moderate, and if at times the contrast was odd, the pair played with such assurance that you couldn’t help conceding their way must be best.
Franz Schubert’s sprawling Fantasy in C Major for Violin and Piano, D. 934, which completed the first half of the program, highlighted Orkis’s nimble tremolo and talent for voicing — especially in the composer’s tender quotation of his own love song, “Sei mir gegrüßt,” in the Andantino movement.
It was in the off-the-beaten-path part of the evening, starting with the Violin Sonata by Ottorino Respighi, that the magic came.
Respighi’s work dates from 1917, which, between Italy’s involvement in World War I and the recent death of his mother, was a dark time for the brilliant and bombastic composer, who is understandably sober here. Yet even in a rigorous sonata form, Respighi can’t help but write extravagantly. He often draws on both quintuplet and septuplet groupings and different simultaneous meters, as if fighting to fit in more notes, more meaning. In the central nocturne, mounting sequences of syncopations threaten to separate the two players forever. The bald violin line emerges from the chromatic climax as if out of ruins.
On Sunday, the Moderato’s first theme had an urgency that made its foil, with tinkling cascades of pianism, all the sweeter. The second movement grew more suspenseful with each phrase. And the finale — a raging passacaglia stretched to the breaking point — thundered to the end.
Quieter, but no less moving, was Likoo, an unaccompanied violin piece by Aftab Darvishi that Mutter is giving the world premiere of on her current U.S. tour.
If Darvishi’s name sounds familiar, that’s perhaps because she was tapped by the Kronos Quartet for its “50 for the Future” project back in 2017. Still, the five-minute violin piece represents a major commission for the 37-year-old composer, whom Mutter discovered on Spotify.
Darvishi here deftly melds musical languages — Baroque polyphony and an improvisatory narrative style traditional to her native Iran — with a cinematic flair. Set alternately with gauzy arpeggiations and brilliant passagework, the melody sighs its song of grief and longing in slow glissandos.
With Likoo, the composer pays tribute to the hundreds of protestors killed in the Women, Life, Freedom movement, sparked in Iran in 2022 by the death of a young woman who had been arrested for allegedly violating the mandatory hijab law. From the stage, Mutter reaffirmed her performance’s dedication to these “lost souls” before amending her statement — “these souls which are not lost because we will not forget them.”
