Patricia Kopatchinskaja is one of the most exciting violinists in the world, along with Hilary Hahn, Viktoria Mullova, Janine Jansen, Julia Fischer and Vilde Frang. But this child of the ball, born in 1977, from the union of a violinist and a cimbalom player, in Chișinău, capital of Moldova, is above all a strange bird. After having delivered imaginative and fiery versions of the concertos of Prokofiev, Bartok and Ligeti, she launched into composition and now has a string of crazy projects with the Alpha label. To start with Lunar Pierrotby Schoenberg, which she recorded and then vocalized on stage, in the costume of the famous commedia dell’arte clown. “I am proud to be a non-professional singer, she confides. Recently I played for Herbert Fritsch who directs improvised plays. I also made a film on a Dadaist text by Kurt Schwitters, with a cameraman, black fabric, garbage cans, toilet paper, a table, a mattress, a salami, four musicians as actors, and my husband as the cafeteria.” His latest CD mixed compositions by Antheil, Beethoven, Cage and Feldman. The next will see her collaborating with soprano Anna Prohaska on works by Frank Martin, Kurtag, and Hildegarde von Bingen. “to show all the faces of woman: Madonna, wife, mother and whore”.
In the meantime, she resumes, on tour, Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto which she recorded in 2013: “For me, it’s Petrushka in a comical version, Stravinsky at the carnival. He puts on his Bach wig, baroque and classical costumes, and dances provoking the audience. I interpret it in a copy of a dress created for Chout, Diaghilev’s ballet which had finally asked Prokofiev to compose the music, after Stravinsky had suggested the idea to him. In Paris, Kopatchinskaja will play with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Russian conductor Vassily Sinaisky who publicly denounced the murderous invasion of Ukraine. “I fear that Putin will attack the rest of Europe, she said suddenly serious, it would be a real disaster.”