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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."