





Patricia Kopatchinskaja
Ariane Levy-Künstler
Jasper Parrott
Nadja Saborova
Polly Byron-Green
“Constantly characterised (and slightly demeaned) as a “quirky maverick”, Kopatchinskaja proved here that she’s in a class of her own.”
(Richard Morrison, The Times, September 2019)
Artistic Partner: Camerata Bern
Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s focus is to get to the heart of the music, to its meaning for us — now and here. With a combination of depth, brilliance and humour, Kopatchinskaja brings an inimitable sense of theatrics to her music. Described by The New York Times “a player of rare expressive energy and disarming informality, of whimsy and theatrical ambition”, Kopatchinskaja’s distinctive approach always conveys the core of the work, whether it is with an out-of-the-box performance of a traditional violin repertoire classic or with an original staged project she presents as experimental performance dramaturge.
In the season 2022/23, Kopatchinskaja once again goes beyond boundaries with a daring musical experiment joining forces with Herbert Fritsch and visual artist Jannis Varelas to create a Neo-Dada opera production Vergeigt at Theater Basel. It is Kopatchinskaja’s Artist Spotlight season at the Barbican Centre and she also takes up the position of Associated Artist of the SWR Experimentalstudio, one of the most important international research centres in the field of electronic music. 2022/23 also sees Kopatchinskaja permiere her new project In search of a lost melody inspired by György Ligeti’s oeuvre and a revival of Maria Mater Meretrix with Anna Prohaska on European tour presenting the image of women throughout the centuries in a musical mosaic, a project that is also released on CD this season. Further ahead, Kopatchinskaja reunites with longstanding recital partner in crime – Fazil Say – for an extensive European tour to kick off the release of their new recording.
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Highlights of the previous season included tours of Europe with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Il Giardino Armonico and the Philharmonia Orchestra, a return to the BBC Proms 2022 and her continued residency as Artistic Partner with Camerata Bern. Kopatchinskaja brought her unlimited creative potential, versatility, and diverse repertoire in innovative curated projects to residencies with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and Elbphilharmonie Hamburg enrichting every programme with eccentric re-interpretations.
Her absolute priority is music of the 20th and 21st century and the collaboration with living composers such as Luca Francesconi, Michael Hersch, György Kurtág, Márton Illés, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Kopatchinskaja directs staged concerts at venues on both sides of the Atlantic and collaborates with leading orchestras, conductors, and festivals worldwide. Following the international success of her previous collaboration with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra — Bye Bye Beethoven - Patricia Kopatchinskaja returned for the premiere performances of a new concert staging with the ensemble — Les Adieux - a project confronting the rapid deterioration of the environment and the loss of the natural world. Kopatchinskaja’s other projects explore music staged through contemporary contexts, such as Dies Irae, another musical reflection on the the growing environmental crisis. She bought this production to Glasgow during the global COP26 summit. Kopatchinskaja also performs as a vocal artist in Ligeti’s Mystères du macabre or Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire where she takes on the role of the Pierrot himself, also in her project presenting Kurt Schwitters’ poem Ursonate as a film in the style of Dada. Following its recent showcase at the Berliner Philharmonie and the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, Ursonate will be shown at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, home to the Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation, to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Kurt Schwitters‘ death.
Kopatchinskaja’s discography includes over 30 recordings, among them GRAMMY award-winning Death and the Maiden with Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, a project which was also re-created as a semi-staged filmed performance with Camerata Bern, premiered on HarrisonParrott’s digital platform Virtual Circle. Recent CD releases season included Les Plaisirs Illuminés with Sol Gabetta and Camerata Bern, which was saluted with a BBC Music Magazine award and Le monde selon George Antheil with Joonas Ahonen (both on Alpha Classics).
Kopatchinskaja is a humanitarian ambassador for Terre des Hommes, the leading Swiss child relief agency and was awarded the Swiss Grand Award for Music by the Federal Office of Culture for Switzerland in 2017.
HarrisonParrott represents Patricia Kopatchinskaja for worldwide general management.
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“Kopatchinskaja breathes life into everything she touches, that we knew already. But this film took it to a new level. Astonishing.”
“[Francisco Coll’s Les Plaisirs Illuminés] draws impeccable, high-precision playing from Kopatchinskaja and her co-soloist Sol Gabetta, both beautifully supple in their responsiveness to Coll’s fantastical invention.”
“The playing from Kopatchinskaja, including the finest gradations of vibrato control and agogic phrasing, is exceptional and the idea of a first among equals unavoidable.”
“Kopatchinskaja has a wonderful way of giving Vivaldi’s plaintive slow movements an extra edge of pathos, drawing a thread of sound as thin and delicate as gossamer.”
“No-one familiar with the work of these unfailingly imaginative and challenging musicians will be disappointed with this absorbing disc, and for the light it shines on Vivaldi and our contemporary responses to his music it counts as essential listening”
“It is the character of a great virtuoso to make the instrument become an extension of the player. Kopatchinskaja, though, is the violin. She plays in a state of astonishment and the violin becomes her.”
“Constantly characterised (and slightly demeaned) as a “quirky maverick”, Kopatchinskaja proved here that she’s in a class of her own.”
“Kopatchinskaja was like a car teasing a butterfly, always ready to pounce on a passing phrase, whether answering the first violins or duetting with a perky clarinet. It has become her calling card to make the familiar unfamiliar.”
“The orchestra’s brilliantly daft staging of John Cage’s Europeras inside a backlot stage at Sony Studios would have been a landmark event in any year, and yet L.A. Phil’s presentation of provocative violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and pianist Gloria Cheng deconstructing pieces by John Cage and Sofia Gubaidulina at the Getty Center proved anew how exciting new music can be when it’s delivered in unusual formats and settings by subversive and committed musicians who don’t mind standing in bathtubs and popping balloons while they perform.”
“Kopatchinskaja’s violin swooped and swerved…It was that subtle but constant sense of music’s theatrical potential that underpinned everything”
Kopatchinskaja’s wild Tchaikovsky
“…it was clear that Kopatchinskaja and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla were musically, historically, and emotionally on the same page. Conductor and soloist wielded their bow and baton like a pair of swashbucklers in a duel between the violin and the orchestra that made everything old sound new again.”
“[She] is a phenomenal virtuoso with the necessary technique to burn and the bravery to then burn it”
“Patricia Kopatchinskaja never fails to engage both the listener’s ears and mind with performances of personality that make scores live as if freshly discovered. Leschenko is the perfect partner.”
“Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who commissioned the concerto (Hersch Violin Concerto), aptly describes it as ‘brutal and vulnerable at the same time’, and her performance conveys that dichotomy with ferocious commitment, aided with fearlessness by the International Contemporary Ensemble under Tito Muñoz. The music’s intense physicality and bleak atmosphere make for gripping, if harrowing, listening. What draws me to listen again and again is Hersch’s ability to communicate desperation that somehow never plummets into despair.”
“She is a player of rare expressive energy and disarming informality, of whimsy and theatrical ambition. (Listen to her Tchaikovsky concerto recording, now!) In all these qualities, she was a perfect choice for Ojai, which each year invites a different artist — a performer, director, composer, conductor or choreographer — to plan the four-day festival as a concentrated shot of his or her enthusiasms.”
“This was a performance like no other, fabulously virtuosic with soloist and orchestra uncannily on the same wavelength.”
“Nor is there anything ordinary about this latest CD, a recital with the pianist Polina Leschenko that is a feast of edgy, risk-filled music-making.”
“One of the most distinctive voices in the violin world at the moment is surely that of Patricia Kopatchinskaja, whose previous recordings of works such as Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto have undoubtedly offered a unique take on familiar pieces. For her latest recording of music by Poulenc, Bartók and Ravel she is joined by pianist Polina Leschenko.”
“In the moments before pressing play on any new recording from Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the only thing you can be absolutely certain of is that you’re about to hear something brimming with personality, individuality and panache”
“….And then there was Kopatchinskaja in the violin work, an astonishing force of nature, powering her way through its hair-raising difficulties as the orchestra conjured a half-remembered world that seems gradually to be slipping beyond recall, and throwing in a cadenza of her own for good measure, one totally consistent with Ligeti’s surreal world.”
“Her voice was her instrument, Sprechstimme her style, a cross between speaking and singing to which she added dramatic movement and expression…She was a sprite in a deconstructed tux, fearless and wild.”
“… Kopatchinskaja commanded the stage, the quintet around her perfectly in sync with her in both rhythm and spirit.”
“In between came a wondrous account of Berg’s violin concerto, written both to mark a death and in the year that Berg himself died. Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s account was fragile, eloquent and never portentous. Her playing captured this heartbreaking music with just the right mixture of tenderness and transcendence.”
“[Ligeti’s Violin Concerto] suits the flamboyant Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who has both the monster technique and the theatricality that the piece demands…. The paradox of her extroversion is that it never seems exhibitionistic. Every gesture serves to underscore the music, and her playing has an animalistic wildness to it that is anything but self-serving. This is playing with guts and meaning, with burly physicality and risk, with a formidable toolkit that can take in everything from fragility to brutality.”
“Patricia Kopatchinskaja shows her astonishing artistry on ‘Take Two’ and ‘Chiaroscuro … Her body and her instrument and the music she makes all seem one. She is ever thrilling alive to the moment … I don’t have to think twice about making my recording of the year.”
“Patricia Kopatchinskaja excels in Thomas Larcher’s extraordinary violin concerto; she brings a fiery originality to everything she plays.” *****