With a combination of profundity, brilliance and humour, Patricia Kopatchinskaja brings an inimitable sense of theatre to her performances. Whether she’s performing a violin concerto by Tchaikovsky, Ligeti or Schoenberg, or presenting original scenic projects that deconstruct Beethoven, Ustvolskaya or Cage, her unmistakable approach always penetrates the heart of a work.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja has performed numerous works by living composers such as Luca Francesconi, Michael Hersch, György Kurtág and Márton Illés, and has worked with leading orchestras and conductors worldwide. She also appears as a vocal artist in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate and Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre.
She is considered to be a boundary-crosser who enjoys the challenge of musical experiments; in this capacity during the 2022/23 season she realized the opera project Vergeigt at Theater Basel with Herbert Fritsch and Jannis Varelas and presented her new project, In search of a lost melody, inspired by the works of György Ligeti. Other projects have included the revival of Maria Mater Meretrix with Anna Prohaska, which presents portraits of women from various epochs through a musical mosaic.
Future projects will include duo recitals with Sol Gabetta and trio recitals with Polina Leschenko and Reto Bieri; opening the 2023/24 season of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra performing Bartók’s First Violin Concerto under Edward Gardner; the world premiere of a new violin concerto by Aureliano Cattaneo and Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto at the Vienna Konzerthaus; Fazıl Say’s Violin Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra under Antonio Pappano; and concerts with Camerata Bern and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
Highlights of the 2021/22 season included her residencies with the Berlin Philharmonic and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, a tour with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, performances with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and continuing engagements as an artistic partner of Camerata Bern.
She has been artist in residence at various festivals, among them the 2017 Lucerne Festival and the 2018 Ojai Music Festival, and regularly performs at the Salzburg Festival.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s recording of Pierrot lunaire was released in April 2021. Her other CD releases include a Vivaldi project with Il Giardino Armonico, the album Plaisirs illuminés with Sol Gabetta and Camerata Bern, Francisco Coll’s Violin Concerto with the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and Gustavo Gimeno, and Death and the Maiden, for which she and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra were awarded a Grammy in 2018. In January 2023 she and Fazıl Say released a recording of violin sonatas by Janáček, Brahms and Bartók.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja is a humanitarian ambassador for the leading Swiss children’s charity terre des hommes, and was awarded the Grand Prix of the Swiss Music Prize in 2017.
