Everyone has seemed to want to write for her: Anne-Sophie Mutter’s artistry has inspired many of today’s leading composers to create new works. The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki wrote no fewer than four pieces for her. The first was his large-scale Second Violin Concerto from 1995. Titled Metamorphosen, its six movements explore transformation and renewal — shifting among different states of mind and between tradition and modernity. Interpreting this concerto, Mutter admits, is “a physical and psychological challenge that I accept with gratitude.” At her side is one of America’s finest orchestras, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Under its Music Director Manfred Honeck, the second half of the program is devoted to Antonín Dvořák’s exhilarating Symphony From the New World, the very archetype of a musical “American Dream.” Dvořák intended the work to show the United States a path toward its own Promised Land of classical music, with a distinctly American musical voice — which is why we hear echoes of African American spirituals as well as melodies and dance rhythms of Indigenous peoples woven into his Ninth.
