Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Ever since her studies in Vienna, Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s way of experiencing and making music has been profoundly influenced by composition.

As a performer, Kopatchinskaja always aims to reconstruct how the music was born in the composer’s imagination, reflecting all the astonishment, colours, emotions, surprises, joys and anxieties inherent to this process. Recreating the ‘first performance’ impression is one of the main objectives of Kopatchinskaja’s interpretation.

With the manuscript as the main source of information about the composer’s imagination and the most telling manual on how to embody this as part of an authentic performance, composition and contemporary music influence Kopatchinskaja’s approach to all music of all times. Equally compelled to dismantle and bring to light the very core construction of the works she plays, Kopatchinskaja sees her approach very much in line with the main targets of historical performance. For Kopatchinskaja, contemporary music is not only a tool to present classical music but a tool to do future-oriented research in a modern context, too.

Amongst her compositions, PatKop wrote and performed a violin concerto with Camerata Bern, the ensemble with whom she is an artistic partner, as well a series of duos. A few of her Ghiribizzi were performed in the Berlin Philharmonie with musicians of the Karajan Academy and in Lockenhaus by Nicolas Altstaedt and Vilde Frang and were recorded for the Alpha label, as well as a duo for Pekka Kuusisto and Kopatchinskaja, performed in Oslo in September 2022. She often performs her pieces as encores with the members of the orchestras she played with. With Reto Bieri, she recorded some of her Duos for violin and clarinet for the Elbphilharmonie’s video production, Phantasmagoria. Her piece for violin and four speaking voices, FlügelnWund, was premiered at Radiokulturhaus ORF 2022.

During the Spring/Summer 2024 season, Kopatchinskaja was a Southbank Centre Resident Artist, and used her tenure as such to bring theatrical traditions to the classical stage and create completely novel concert experiences. These included a performance of works by Schnittke, Ligeti and Cage with the Aurora Orchestra which turned our stage into a living room, and Dies Irae, a musical evocation of a final day on earth.