










Patricia Kopatchinskaja
Ariane Levy-Künstler
Jasper Parrott
Nadja Saborova
Astrid Boissier
“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
“Kopatchinskaja was like a cat 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.”
Rebecca Franks, The Times, May 2019
With a combination of depth, brilliance and humour, Kopatchinskaja brings an inimitable sense of theatrics to her music. Whether performing a violin concerto by Tchaikovsky, Ligeti or Schoenberg or presenting an original staged project deconstructing Beethoven, Ustwolskaja or Cage, her distinctive approach always conveys the core of the work.
Highlights of the 2020/21 season included a residency with Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, performing Shostakovich with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Fesival d’Aix-en-Provence, Bamberg Symphony, and SWR Symphony Orchestra. Kopatchinskaja brought her own unique creativity to these residencies, performing Pierrot Lunaire and her project Dies Irae to great acclaim. Another highlight of the season was her debut at the BBC Proms, performing Bartók with BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov, which received a 5* review from The Times (as did her Edinburgh Festival recital with Joonas Ahonen). Kopatchinskaja also gave recitals in venues across Europe such as Wiener Konzerthaus, DR Koncerthuset in Copenhagen, Liszt Academy of Music, Passau Festival, DeDoelen in Rotterdam, and Gstaad Festival, performing with regular recital partners Joonas Ahonen, Polina Leschenko and Fazil Say.
The forthcoming 2021/22 season features engagements with top level orchestras including residencies with Berlin Philharmoniker and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, a tour with Budapest Festival Orchestra, appearances with Toronto Symphony with Gustavo Gimeno, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Manchester Camerata, and her continued residency as Artistic Partner with Camerata Bern.
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Kopatchinskaja will continue to showcase the works of living composers such as Luca Francesconi, Michael Hersch, György Kurtág and Márton Illés in her varied and innovative curated projects like Bye Bye Beethoven, and her video recording of Kurt Schwitters’ surreal Dadaist poem Ursonate.
Kopatchinskaja’s other projects explore music staged through contemporary contexts, such as Dies Irae, a musical reflection on the the growing environmental crisis. She brings this production to Glasgow in November 2021 with RSNO to coincide with the global COP26 summit.
CD releases in the 2020/21 season included Les Plaisirs Illuminés with Sol Gabetta and Camerata Bern (Alpha Classics), which was nominated for a Gramophone Magazine award, and Francisco Coll’s Violin Concerto with Orchestra Philharmonique du Luxembourg and Gustavo Gimeno (Pentatone). Kopatchinskaja and Gabetta will tour Europe in autumn of 2021 to mark the release of their forthcoming duos album (Alpha Classics). Kopatchinskaja’s Vivaldi project with Il Giardino Armonico, “What’s Next Vivaldi?” featuring new works by living composers, was released on disc in summer 2020 on Alpha Classics and received an Opus Klassik award in autumn 2021. In 2018 she won a Grammy Award in the Best Chamber and Small Ensemble Performance category for Death and the Maiden with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (Alpha). In 2021 this project was reborn as a semi-staged filmed performance with Camerata Bern, premiered on HarrisonParrott’s digital platform Virtual Circle.
Kopatchinskaja held the position of Artistic Partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra from 2014 – 2018, and is a humanitarian ambassador for Terre des Hommes, the leading Swiss child relief agency. She was awarded the Swiss Grand Award for Music by the Federal Office of Culture for Switzerland in 2017 and has held positions as Artist in Residence at various festivals including Lucerne (2017) and Ojai (2018).
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.” *****