Patricia Kopatchinskaja


Patricia Kopatchinskaja is a Moldovan-Austrian-Swiss violinist.

Early life and career

Kopatchinskaja was born in Chișinău, in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. She comes from a family of musicians. Her parents were both with the state folk ensemble of Moldova: her mother, Emilia Kopatchinskaja, was a violinist, and her father, Viktor Kopatchinsky, was a cimbalom player. While her parents were on concert tour through the former Eastern bloc, she grew up with her grandparents. She started playing the violin at age 6.
In 1989, the family fled to Vienna. Kopatchinskaja entered the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna at age 17, where she studied musical composition and violin. From age 21 to 23 she finished her studies in Bern, at the Musikhochschule, where her teachers included Igor Ozim. Kopatchinskaja, her Swiss neurologist husband, and their daughter live in Bern, Switzerland.

Musician

The British Royal Philharmonic Society in 2014 named Kopatchinskaja "instrumentalist of the year" describing her as an “irresistible force of nature: passionate, challenging and totally original in her approach.”

Soloist

Kopatchinskaja has played with most of the important European orchestras including Vienna, Berlin and London Philharmonic. She regularly plays in Japan and Australia and recently also extended her activity to the United States, South America, Russia and China. She has an ongoing collaboration with amongst others the following conductors: Teodor Currentzis, Péter Eötvös, Tito Muñoz, Iván Fischer, Heinz Holliger, Vladimir Jurowski, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Kirill Petrenko, Sir Simon Rattle and François-Xavier Roth.

Leading orchestras and festivals

Kopatchinskaja's experience as a leader of ensembles and chamber orchestras includes a tour with Britten Sinfonia, repeated tours with Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra and being an artistic partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra since 2014. Presently she is an artistic partner of the Camerata Bern. She has organised several staged concert productions: "Death and the Maiden" with Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, "Bye-Bye Beethoven" with Mahler Chamber Orchestra, "Dies Irae" with Lucerne Festival Alumni, as well as "War and Chips" and "Time and Eternity" with Camerata Bern.
From 2003-2005 Kopatchinskaja organised the Rüttihubeliade festival in the Swiss Alps.
In June 2018, Kopatchinskaja was the music director of the Ojai Music Festival in California.

Chamber music partners

Regular chamber music partners include cellist Sol Gabetta, clarinettist Reto Bieri and the pianists Markus Hinterhäuser, Polina Leschenko and Anthony Romaniuk.
In April 2016, Kopatchinskaja performed with Anoushka Shankar at a concert in Konzerthaus Berlin, Germany. The Raga Piloo was composed, performed and recorded by Ravi Shankar as a duet with Yehudi Menuhin on the album West Meets East, Volume 2 in 1968.

Historically informed performance

Kopatchinskaja has collaborated with Il Giardino Armonico, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, MusicAeterna Perm, the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under the direction of Giovanni Antonini, René Jacobs and Philippe Herreweghe. She also has performed with Sir Roger Norrington and Roy Goodman.

Violins

Kopatchinskaja plays a violin built by Giovanni Francesco Pressenda in 1834, according to Dennis Rooney in the British music magazine The STRAD, March 2003 "a very colourful-sounding instrument whose viola-like quality lent her playing exceptional tonal interest". In 2010 for a short time, she played a violin by Guarneri del Gesù „ex-Carrodus“ 1741, on loan from the Austrian National Bank. She had to give it back because of unresolvable problems with Swiss customs authorities. In period instrument environments she uses a violin built by Ferdinando Gagliano and appropriate bows.

Voice

Kopatchinskaja uses the voice in several compositions, including John Cage's "Living Room Music", Jorge Sanchez-Chiong's "Crin", Michael Hersch's Duo for violin and cello "Das Rückgrat berstend", Heinz Holliger's "Das kleine Irgendwas", her own cadenza for György Ligeti's violin concerto, and Otto Zykan's "Das mit der Stimme".
In 2017 Kopatchinskaja performed the voice part in Arnold Schönberg's "Pierrot lunaire" in the USA and in 2018-19 she will give several performances of the same piece in Europe and Canada.
In 2018 Kopatchinskaja videorecorded with some friends the first movement of Kurt Schwitters's Dadaistic nonsense-poem "Ursonate".

First performances

Kopatchinskaja gave first performances of numerous works, e.g.:
Richard Carrick, Violeta Dinescu, Michalis Economou, Heinz Holliger, Ludwig Nussbichler, Jorge Sánchez-Chiong, Ivan Sokolov, and Boris Yoffe have also written works for her.

Awards