Sophie-Mayuko Vetter is a multi-faceted musician who composes, improvises, works in musicology, and studied to be a master overtone singer in the tradition of her late father Michael Vetter. She’s also a remarkably individual pianist.
Vetter approaches Brahms’ late piano pieces freely, stretching out phrases and tempos, scrutinizing inner voices and counterlines, and savoring every last drop of harmonic tension. Old-school unsynchronized hands and broken chords sneak in on rare occasions. Listeners accustomed to, say, Emanuel Ax’s straightforward lyrical warmth in the Op. 117 Intermezzi will find Vetter’s persistent reading between the lines idiosyncratic, to say the least. However, Vetter’s fierce concentration and seriousness of intent usually prevent her interpretations from sounding indulgent or shapeless.
She milks the Op. 119 No. 1 Intermezzo’s slow descending arpeggios for maximum textural variety, and makes more of the sudden short rests than most pianists. In Op. 119 No. 2’s trio section, the wide left-hand interval leaps against the expansive right-hand melody convey uncommon linear independence. Perhaps the little C major No. 3 (made famous by Myra Hess) is inflected to extremes, but Vetter’s way of arpeggiating many of No. 4’s powerful block chords casts a sweeping, unusually revealing light on the music.
Op. 116 also proves stimulating and unpredictable in Vetter’s hands, notably in regard to No. 2’s unorthodox melodic accents, No. 3’s unusually extreme mood contrasts, and No. 6’s hypnotic longeurs. However, No. 4’s rhetorical rubatos dissipate the momentum and interplay of Brahms’ rhythmic figures. Interestingly, the short posthumously published pieces without opus numbers receive relatively direct, full-bodied readings. If the newly-discovered Albumblatt in A minor from 1853 (recorded here for the first time) sounds somewhat familiar, it’s due to the fact that Brahms reworked the music 12 years later into his horn trio. Whether or not Vetter’s Brahms will suit all tastes, she compels you to listen.
