“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.”

“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.”

“Kopatchinskaja’s violin swooped and swerved…It was that subtle but constant sense of music’s theatrical potential that underpinned everything”

“[She] is a phenomenal virtuoso with the necessary technique to burn and the bravery to then burn it”

“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.”

“This was a performance like no other, fabulously virtuosic with soloist and orchestra uncannily on the same wavelength.”

“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.”

“….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.”

“… Kopatchinskaja commanded the stage, the quintet around her perfectly in sync with her in both rhythm and spirit.”

“[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 excels in Thomas Larcher’s extraordinary violin concerto; she brings a fiery originality to everything she plays.” *****