DVD Videos

The DVD continues the success of the Brahms CD with Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis, released in March (4778767). Recent reviews are excellent and will certainly make for an outstanding DVD:

“Never before have Mutter and Orkis seemed so joined at the hip, giving and taking, conducting dialogue, chasing each others’ thoughts . . . She plays with a new degree of maturity and depth, especially visible in the slow movements. The disc’s high point is the adagio from the first sonata, in G major, where Mutter’s gold thread is reduced to a dusky murmur before shifting through tones as subtle as they are various. Orkis’s contribution is equally vital, whether keeping pace with limpid filigree or, at the close, pedalling up a penumbra of resonance to balance Mutter’s whispers. Magical music-making, this. Elsewhere, Mutter shows that she is able to become passionately alive without shaking with neuroses. In the third sonata, in D minor, the finale lives up to Brahms’s instruction -- "presto agitato" -- but never races over the top. Throughout, speeds and dynamics are controlled with regard for the music’s inner substance, not its outward show . . . The CD’s delectable virtues also include Deutsche Grammophon’s clear, well-balanced recording. A masterly issue . . .” The Times (London)

On this recording, Anne-Sophie Mutter, accompanied by pianist Lambert Orkis, shares her up-to-date thoughts on the Brahms Violin Sonatas that have been central to her repertoire from the start of her career

As bonus material the DVD includes Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis in conversation in English (with subtitles), Anne-Sophie Mutter on Brahms’s Violin Sonatas in German and the promotional video.

In August 2007, Anne-Sophie Mutter performed the world premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina‘s 2nd violin concerto in Lucerne with conductor Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. This piece by the Russian composer (born in 1931) was an important event in many respects. Sofia Gubaidulina is one of the world‘s leading contemporary composers. Her international breakthrough came in 1980 with her first violin concerto, Offertorium, which she wrote for Gidon Kremer. To this day, it remains her most often performed piece. In spite of all the other pieces she has written in the meantime, it is her second violin concerto that violinists, conductors and orchestras around the world have eagerly been awaiting, especially since she was commissioned to write it in 1992 by Paul Sacher, the Basel conductor and patron of the arts. It was his wish that Gubaidulina‘s new violin concerto first be performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter. Fifteen years later, that dream finally came true.

The film focuses on the piece - from its inception, through the many stages of the creative process to its world premiere but also features the many great expectations of the music world and the resulting pressure on Gubaidulina. It’s not the usual portrait of the composer but concentrates on the work in progress and documents the collaboration between Anne-Sophie Mutter, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.

"First I hear the end of the piece. I hear it all at once, all mixed up and hard to recognize. As if everything were tied in a knot. It‘s too complicated. I can‘t write that moment down. I have to make it clearer to eventually get back to what I originally heard." Sofia Gubaidulina

"The most beautiful music film I have ever seen." Joachim Kaiser

Award at the Columbus International Film Festival 2008, nominated for Prix Italia

Sound Format: PCM Stereo

Picture Format: 16:9

DVD Format: DVD 5, NTSC

Subtitle Languages: DE, IT, GB, FR, ES, JP

Running Time: 60 mins

FSK: 0

Documentary: Lilian Birnbaum, Peter Stephan Jungk

Bonus: Horant H. Hohlfeld

André Previn is one of the most multi-talented and prominent musicians of our time, a composer of music of all genres, a conductor, arranger, pianist and jazz musician.

He won, among countless Awards, four Oscars for his movie scores, had 13 Oscar nominations and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010

This intimate portrait features Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mia Farrow, Oscar Peterson, Renée Fleming, Lukas Previn

Bonus: Two Mozart Piano Quartets (featuring members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, filmed in 2000)

Running Time Total: 107 minutes

Documentary: 52 minutes

Mozart Quartets: 55 minutes

Picture 16:9, color

Sound PCM Stereo

Subtitles German, English, French, Spanish

Karajan's star pupils dedicate this wonderful performance to their teacher as a celebration of his 100th birthday: A "triumph of remembrance," wrote Die Welt following this stirring concert given by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Seiji Ozawa and with Anne-Sophie Mutter as soloist. It left its audience hovering between hushed reverence and deafening exultation.The Golden Hall of Vienna's Musikverein was the dazzling venue for the live recording of this concert celebrating the 100th birthday of Herbert von Karajan. And there Karajan's 'Berliner' never sounded better, evoking "a time which self-confidently sought the private and subjective in music, and believed it could find them in the mirror of the works" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). It is a concert that commemorates Herbert von Karajan for the ages in a supremely moving manner.

"For Anne-Sophie Mutter the saying "Make every note count" becomes less a vague cliché and more a matter of fact. Her violin playing has an imagination, a curiosity and a near-endless reserve of psychic energy." The New York Times

+ BONUS: interviews with Mutter and Ozawa - includes many clips of Karajan's outstanding career.