(Critic's Pick)

NEW YORK — Ghosts were always going to be part of star violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter’s recital at Carnegie Hall this week. The advertised program featured Mozart, as well as the spirit of that composer as it flickers through later French music. And the concert was also to include Sebastian Currier’s new “Ghost Trio,” which riffs on themes of influence and musical forebears.

But when Mutter and her longtime chamber music partner, pianist Lambert Orkis, took to the stage at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, the specter most strongly felt was that of André Previn, the conductor, composer and musical polymath. Mutter and Previn were once married and remained close friends and artistic collaborators until his death Feb. 28.

And so, at the end of an evening of brilliant and often uncannily delicate music-making, Mutter played two Previn works as encores. She dedicated them to him — “wherever he is now,” she said with a spiraling gesture taking in the air around and above her.

Mutter has built her career on a rich, glossy tone and glamorous stage presence. She is one of the few violinists who can pull off solo recitals in Carnegie’s big hall. On this occasion, she used her magnetism to draw listeners into a world of sounds that included pallid, watery tones a mere whisper away from silence.

Most surprising, perhaps, she used these spectral colors in the opening work, Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E minor (K. 304), where the opening theme took on brittle weariness. In the second movement, she rendered one ostensibly sunny theme with such spidery lightness that the consolation it offered came across as a mere mirage.

In Debussy’s Violin Sonata, such disembodied sounds are written into the score by a composer who plays on fluctuations of heat and density. In this elegant and sensuous music, Mutter showed off her trademark rich tone and flamboyant expressiveness.

A second Mozart sonata, in B flat (K. 454), became a vehicle for spirited and flirtatious playing, as did the debonair and witty Violin Sonata of Poulenc. Both works trick the listener with wait-for-it endings. After more than 25 years playing together, Mutter and Orkis have their comic timing down pat.

Humor, alienation and hallucinatory echoes of past music come together in Currier’s “Ghost Trio.” In nine succinct movements, with titles like “Remote,” “Mysterious” and “Forceful,” this work weaves glancing — and distorted — references to piano trios by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and others into his own intricate, emotionally focused language. In duet with Mutter, Orkis’ playing is unfailingly attentive. Here his technical brilliance came to the forefront while Daniel Müller-Schott’s buttery cello added depth and contour.

Müller-Schott also joined for the first encore, a movement from Previn’s Piano Trio No. 1, which had its premiere (with Mutter and, on piano, Previn himself) 10 years ago at Carnegie. The movement, “Spirited,” maintains a sybaritic optimism even through emotional U-turns.

A touching rendition of “Song” from “Tango Song and Dance” (1997) followed. Written for Mutter, she played this effusively melodic music with a sweet, sometimes tremulous tone that felt unaffected and personal.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.