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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.