Review: New World Symphony at Carnegie Hall With Anne-Sophie Mutter

It was an inspiring statement, as well as a smart artistic choice. On Tuesday night, the extraordinary German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter chose to conclude her series of six programs this season as a Perspectives artist at Carnegie Hall by playing two challenging 20th-century concertos with the youthful New World Symphony and its conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

Ms. Mutter, who has long devoted time to working with emerging musicians, seemed in her element with the New World Symphony, which was co-founded 27 years ago by Mr. Thomas as a training ensemble for select post-undergraduate instrumentalists. Since 2011, the orchestra, based in Miami Beach, has enjoyed a splendid home hall, the New World Center, designed by Frank Gehry.

As usual, the New World Symphony on Tuesday sounded terrific, playing with impressive skill and confidence for the two works Ms. Mutter chose: a searching, dark and revelatory account of Berg’s great 1935 Violin Concerto, a wrenching but, by the end, profoundly consoling piece; and the New York premiere of Norbert Moret’s “En Rêve,” a 17-minute concerto of mystical allure and hazy colorings written for Ms. Mutter in 1988, one of a long list of pieces she has fostered and championed.

To begin, though, Mr. Thomas conducted three selections, lasting 25 minutes, from Schubert’s Incidental Music to “Rosamunde.” The orchestra gave striking depth to music often treated as lighter fare.

Berg’s Violin Concerto was his final composition, dedicated “to the memory of an angel,” Manon Gropius, daughter of Walter Gropius and Mahler’s widow, Alma. The first movement is a portrait of Manon, with passages of ethereal beauty, melting lyrical outpourings, hints of Austrian folk music and playful dances, and bouts of what seems barely contained anger. The second movement could also be considered a portrait, one of grief, with bursts of stabbing chords, frenzied violin wails and episodes of mourning music, until Berg slowly folds in a beautiful Bach chorale, “Es is genug,” which brings depleted, if relieving, peace to the concerto’s final section. Ms. Mutter played with commanding dramatic sweep, wondrous subtlety, incisive attack in tortured passages and plush tone in the wistful ones.

She brought comparable qualities to her formidable performance of Moret’s “En Rêve,” a work inspired by “one of my favorite themes — the dream,” wrote the composer, who died in 1998. The piece came across here as an exploration of colors and sounds. “Hazy Light,” the opening movement, is indeed misty-textured and intriguingly amorphous, with crackling, tinkling orchestral effects and a violin part that shifts between slinky lyricism and rhapsodic bustling. After a deliberative middle section, the final one, “Fascinating Blue,” breaks into gnashing back and forth conflicts between the soloist and orchestra, which sometimes battles itself.

The program ended with an uncommonly incisive and, when called for, blazingly brassy account of Debussy’s “La Mer.” Mr. Thomas’s aim, it seemed, was to put aside assumptions about this score as a high point of lovely Impressionism, and instead treat it as something feisty, as radical as anything written at the start of the 20th century.

It was good to see so many young people attending the concert. Some of them, I suspect, might have been former members of the New World Symphony, which has so far sent some 950 musicians into the field.