Listening to Anne-Sophie Mutter play Penderecki’s second violin concerto – Metamorphosen – with the LPO at Bridgewater Hall last night caused me to reflect on issues of change and consistency.

Let’s deal with the change first: the shift in Penderecki’s music from the mid-1970s and in turn my own reaction to his later music. I loved Penderecki’s early pieces from works like Threnody, and De Natura Sonoris to the first Symphony, and the excitement of those thrilling scores. I couldn’t understand – felt betrayed almost – by his shift to a kind of hyper late romantic post-Shostakovich style, more or less from around the first violin concerto of 1976-1977. It just seemed dark and boring. But over the years, perhaps with greater familiarity, perhaps just my getting older and (hopefully) more mature, I’ve come to appreciate the depth of these pieces, and the wonderful handling of the orchestra, especially in Metamorphosen and particularly when played as well as it was by the LPO. If anything, it is now the earlier works that seem a little superficial.

More importantly though, what struck me most was Anne-Sophie herself. The brilliance of her playing was never going to be in doubt, that was a given. She followed the concerto with a Bach encore so exquisite that it had me not wanting to breathe lest I disturb her, and I can think of few musicians of her calibre who have been so committed to the cause of contemporary music, but it was the consistency of her approach to music that registered most strongly. I was a student when I first saw her play as a teenager, when Karajan brought the Berlin Phil to Oxford, and because she started so young I almost feel like she’s been around forever (when in fact she’s two years younger than me). There’s no shortage these days of brilliant young violinists, but that connection to Karajan links her to a different age. An age before the mediocrity of the present day; a time before the obsession with diversity and inclusivity, and the false god of cultural relativism. A world before talent shows designed for the curse of attention deficit, and before BBC arts and culture descended to the level of ‘journeys’ and soundbites.

With Anne-Sophie Mutter you know that what matters above all is the music and that everything else should be subservient to the art itself. A seriousness of purpose so often missing in the shallow waters of the quotidian inanities of life.