Anne-Sophie Mutter, Nancy Zhou, Ye-Eun Choi: East Meets West

The Strad Issue: April 2026

Description: A champion of new music celebrates her half-century on stage

Musicians: Anne-Sophie Mutter, Nancy Zhou, Ye-Eun Choi (violins) Muriel Razavi (viola) Pablo Ferrández (cello) London Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès

Works: Music by Adès, Chin, Darvashi and Widmann

Catalogue number: ALPHA ALPHA1244

EAST MEETS WEST

The title of this release might be pushing things a bit. The first instalment in Anne-Sophie Mutter’s new, several-album series for Alpha celebrating her half-century as a performer is hardly a penetrating examination of musical influences flowing between East and West. What it is, however, is a warm celebration of Mutter’s commitment to new music, delivered in exceptional performances.

She’s on her own for the 2024 Likoo by Iranian–Dutch composer Aftab Darvashi, which draws on songs of sadness and loss from Baluchistan but is shot through with Bachian figurations and harmonies, and makes persuasive use of Mutter’s silvery, shining tone.

She’s joined by Nancy Zhou for Unsuk Chin’s exuberant, increasingly desperate Gran cadenza from 2021, in which the two violinists vie for attention in music of energy and breathless flamboyance; they could, though, have indulged the piece’s mischievous wit a little more.

Mutter heads a string quartet for the disc’s most substantial work: in the half-hour Studie über Beethoven of 2024, Jörg Widmann slips teasingly in and out of semi-quotations from the earlier composer, and the violinist’s ensemble matches its restlessly shifting moods with unwavering conviction.

Thomas Adès’s Pärt-like Air from 2022 makes for a luminous, consoling closer, as Mutter soars ever higher in dazzling brightness against clangorous gongs and rumbles deep in a piano.

DAVID KETTLE