By withdrawing their Perlman/Ozawa version of the Berg Violin Concerto (12/84) DG have left us without an obvious first-choice recommendation. But they have replaced it with a performance which has as strong a claim as any—Anne-Sophie Mutter is here at her commanding warm-toned best, James Levine and the Chicago Symphony place and colour the orchestral part with care and precision, and the DG engineers let us hear as much detail and richness as any previous recording of the work.
Mutter's is a highly romantic view. Sensitive and sensuous, soulful and soul-baring, ravishing and ravaged, the music enters your living-room with a vividness you may find overpowering. But this seems to me a valid approach, after all, what is the point of those last nine minutes of bitter-sweet consolation without some idea of what it is that has to be assuaged? All the same, I'm not sure I would always want to hear the violin's first semi-quaver passage so passionately projected (2'37' from bar 47) or the horn and trumpet's Carinthian folk-song so fulsomely accompanied by the soloist (10'08'', from bar 214).
There would be more point in pursuing such details were there an obviously superior rival. But while I warm to Frank Peter Zimmermann's open-heartedness (EMI) and Kyung-Wha Chung's affection and tonal variety (Decca) both are too direct and conventionally expressive for my liking, and I agree with AW in finding Grumiaux on Philips somewhat lacking in introspection and magic. The historic 1936 Gramophone Award-winning BBC recording by the Concerto's dedicatee with Webern conducting (on Continuum) has precisely the kind of probing inwardness and almost unbearable tenderness that for me lie at the heart of Berg's music, but you do have to listen through a lot of sizzling-sausage hiss to get at it; perhaps best to regard this as an essential back-up rather than a first choice. In the meantime there is no mistaking the mastery of Mutter and the Chicago Symphony, and by the time she arrives on her final ecstatic top G any residual doubts are long forgotten.
Mutter and DG's commitment to new repertoire is in itself cause for celebration; this is the third time they have given us a new concertante work alongside a major twentieth-century concerto (previous issues were Lutoslawski/Stravinsky, 2/89 and Moret/Bartok, 11/91). The 40-year-old Wolfgang Rihm has a considerable reputation in his native Germany and specialist collectors may have come across his expressionistic opera Jakob Lenz (at one time available on LP from German Harmonia Mundi). Time chanted, a 24-minute piece composed 1991–2, is a study in sonority, using the small orchestra at first as a kind of resonating chamber for the violin (the composer calls it a Doppelganger), then gradually introducing more aggressive ideas.
There are many helpful points of contact with the Berg—wide-intervalled intersecting lines extensive use of solo strings from the orchestra the sense that the listener's trust has been won before the most challenging ideas materialize. Every note, from the violin's opening F sharp to its concluding B a third above the last note of the Berg, has been weighed in the imagination and given time to register. This is not the kind of sacerdotal neo-sensualism you might associate with Gorecki, Tavener or Part, however; the nearest I can get to a stylistic orientation is to suggest that it is a cross between Takemitsu and Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
Rihm's approach to the medium was directly inspired by aspects of Anne-Sophie Mutter's playing: ''precisely in remoteness her playing is richest and most alive''. No surprise then to hear poetry and conviction throughout the performance; and again DG's beautifully judged recording enhances the experience. Had I read the composer's references to ''the vibrating of the ray of time, the energy which collects in the note in order to generate the next note'' before hearing the music, I might have suspected pretentiousness, reading them afterwards they seemed no more than a precise encapsulation of its special atmosphere. I want to come back to this piece a few more times before pronouncing further, but it is already saying a lot that Rihm's work is not embarrassed in the company of the Berg.'