The Club Album (Live From Yellow Lounge)

Anne-Sophie Mutter finds a “new home”In May 2015 Anne-Sophie Mutter put her noble, impressively named “Lord Dunn-Raven” Stradivarius through more than its usual paces. For a change, rather than standing on stage in one of the world’s renowned grand concert halls, she spent two evenings playing in a tiny graffiti-scrawled nightclub in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin. The name of the club was Neue Heimat, or “new home”, and it was jam-packed with hip young people. The atmosphere heated up in the usual way for such clubs, but not in the usual way for Anne-Sophie Mutter’s concerts. As she later put it: “It wasn’t good for the Strad’s wood. It was extremely hot in the club, and in the long run it put a big strain on the varnish. So to prevent the original varnish from becoming damaged we applied a thin protective coat to the Strad where it touches my bare skin. But any instrument over 300 years old is bound to show signs of wear and tear.”But what’s a Strad doing in a Berlin nightclu