Siren Songs at Center Stage

By Michael Walsh

They seem at first to have little in common, the wunderkind and the defector. One commands the stage like a young princess, voluptuous in a strapless designer gown that accents the alluring curve of her shoulders and the luxurious corona of her billowing tresses. As Anne-Sophie Mutter lays her bow on the strings of her Stradivarius, the music swells seductively, and all at once the intoxicating perfume of the theater fills the air. "Music is a form of love, the highest form of love," she says. "It is passion."

The other woman is a tall, slender young spartan in a loose, kimono-like black jacket and pants, her long, lank brown hair pulled back severely, her strong Slavic features firmly set in contemplation of the coming battle. No makeup or jewelry lends even a hint of frivolity to her appearance as she wraps one large hand around the neck of her Strad, tucks it confidently under her chin and prepares to stare down the ghost of Paganini. For Viktoria Mullova, there are no frills in concert, just her, the night and the music. & "I work better under pressure," she says. "I am more concentrated."

Together they make a contrapuntal etude. Mutter, 24, is a child of the prosperous West German bourgeoisie who grew up in a small town near the Black Forest and still returns frequently to visit her family. Mullova, 28, abandoned the gray streets and grayer bureaucracy of her native Moscow in 1983. Yet both women, currently in the forefront of young performers on their instrument, are emblematic of an important development in the world of concert music: the rise and triumph of the female solo violinist.

Mutter and Mullova are just two of the many women violinists of talent and temperament now gracing the world's stages. Korean-born Kyung-Wha Chung, 40, shared first prize in the Leventritt Competition with Pinchas Zukerman in 1967, and has since established herself as a major artist on the strength of her burnished tone and fiery passagework. Chung is a performer of great interpretative range and insight who can light up the night with a blazing Tchaikovsky concerto, probe the intimate, sorrowing mysteries of Alban Berg's twelve-tone essay in the form, or tackle Sir Edward Elgar's king-and-country Violin Concerto with equal aplomb. She also plays in a chamber trio with her sister Myung-Wha, a cellist, and her brother Myung-Whun, a pianist now making a career as a conductor.

The burgeoning contingent of Asian performers also boasts the tiny 16-year- old Japanese prodigy Midori (born Midori Goto), a student of noted Violin Teacher Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard. Midori's robust tone and strong technique -- and her uncanny composure in the face of two broken strings during her performance of Leonard Bernstein's Serenade -- stunned a Tanglewood audience on a muggy summer night two years ago at a Boston Symphony concert led by Bernstein.

Another DeLay student, the sloe-eyed, Roman-born Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, has had a rapid ascent since her 1981 victory in the Naumburg International Violin Competition. Salerno-Sonnenberg, 27, is a mediagenic performer hailed by some for her intensity ("the Edith Piaf of the violin," a colleague has called her) and scorned by others for the eccentric collection of tics, twitches and transports that form her onstage persona. But there is no gainsaying her vivid stage presence, or the enthusiasm with which she imbues her performances. Other noteworthy women violinists include the Kavafian sisters, Ani, 39, and Ida, 35, both adept soloists as well as chamber musicians, and the graceful Rumania-born Miriam Fried, 41.

Popular wisdom holds that virtuosity on any instrument is a hard-won proposition, the product of years of painstaking study and practice. Despite the evidence of such performers as the pathbreaking American Maud Powell around the turn of the century or the brilliant Vienna-born Erica Morini, now 84 and in retirement, it also holds that the violin is properly a male preserve. But with age comes maturity, not mastery, and instruments are no respecters of gender. Although still young, today's crop of women violinists can already be judged on accomplishment rather than promise -- or sex.

The group is a formidable one, but right now it appears that Mutter and Mullova are in the ascendancy. Mutter's gifts include a consummate control of her instrument, gleaming intonation, ripe sound and an assured, nerveless stage demeanor. They seem to have come naturally. At age nine, Mutter coolly performed a solo Bach piece for Violinist Henryk Szeryng. The Polish-born master, dressed in shirt-sleeves, first listened dispassionately. When she had finished, he walked to his closet, donned a coat and tie and announced, "Now you can say hello to Uncle Henryk." Something similar happened when, at 13, she auditioned for Conductor Herbert von Karajan. After hearing her play a dazzling Bach Chaconne and some elegant Mozart, Karajan said, "We shall do a lot together." And they have, including many concerts and recordings of such staples as the Beethoven and Brahms concertos. "Playing with Karajan, there is an experience of sound you don't find elsewhere," notes Mutter. "It is musical breathing."

Lately, Mutter has been performing frequently with Cellist and Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, both as a soloist with Rostropovich's National Symphony Orchestra in Washington and as two-thirds of a string trio that includes Violist Bruno Giuranna. Speaking as one for whom the violinistic legerdemain of the two Prokofiev concertos holds no terrors, Mutter observes of her new mentor: "He is the only one who knows what was going on with Prokofiev when he wrote that music."

Mullova's path was not as charmed. At age nine she won entrance to Moscow's rigorous Central Music School, a two-commute from the family's home on the city's outskirts. Just getting in was an accomplishment: the school, she says, is usually reserved for the children of famous musicians or of well-connected people. Her indisputable talent eventually brought her to noted Soviet | Violinist Leonid Kogan, and to a shared gold medal in the 1982 Tchaikovsky International Competition. Like Kogan's, Mullova's somewhat austere playing is not to every taste, but her secure technique and impeccable musicianship bespeak a performer who prizes substance over style. What it needs now is a sense of fantasy and wonder -- a whiff of perfume -- to make it complete.

That deficiency may be in part owing to the rigid Soviet system, which Mullova says inhibited both her career prospects and her spirit. "Life in the Soviet Union was spent like in a prison," she says today. In person, Mullova is focused and direct, very much like her playing style, although she has loosened somewhat after five years in the West. The pain of separation from her family too has eased, with the emigration of her sister Ludmilla, who now lives with her American husband in Atlanta, and the visit last year of her mother Raisa.

Mullova's defection was practically operatic. On a tour of Finland, she contrived to bring along her lover, Conductor Vakhtang Jordania, as her accompanist, despite the fact that Jordania was an indifferent and inexperienced pianist. The couple eluded their Soviet duenna, fleeing by taxi across the Swedish border, and sought refuge at the American embassy in Stockholm. In the U.S., the great American publicity machine was enchanted by the striking Russian woman with some command of English. Her career flourished while Jordania's languished, and the relationship faded.

Belying her intense, passionate approach to performing -- she holds the stage like a diva -- in private Mutter radiates ebullient charm and high spirits. Mutter, who will play 120 engagements this year, keeps an apartment in Monte Carlo, zips around in her Porsche 911 and relaxes by doing yoga, reading Agatha Christie and watching horror films; she listens with pleasure to jazz and rock, and has even jammed with Jazzman Dizzy Gillespie after a concert in Paris. But her approach to her work remains sober. "The key to being serious as a musician is humility," she observes. "If you play Mozart, you can't treat him like the guy next door."

Mullova's recordings for Philips (Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony, Vivaldi's The Four Seasons with Claudio Abbado) are selling briskly, and her bookings -- 50 this season -- are bright. Although she claimed to want the stimulus of a lively capital after the provincialism of Moscow, the hurly-burly of Manhattan became overwhelming for the still somewhat dour Russian. Today Mullova shares a comfortable furnished Vienna apartment near St. Stephen's Cathedral with Conductor Abbado, and travels on an Austrian passport.

Mullova rejects the familiar argument that women cannot have both a family and a career. "I don't see why not," she says. "I would like to continue just at the pace I'm going now. I want to progress slowly, as a musician and as a person, but I want to go up." Mutter declines to speculate about her private life, but about her career she is in harmony with Mullova. "Ten years from now, 30 years from now, I want more or less to be doing the same thing," she says. "Just better." Perhaps they are not so very different after all.

With reporting by Gertraud Lessing/Vienna and Nancy Newman/New York