February 3, 2020 • 7:49 am Comments Off on Intensity and compassion: Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s stunning return to Seattle
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Thomas Dausgaard and the Seattle Symphony
© Carlin Ma
When Patricia Kopatchinskaja is on the bill, you’re guaranteed to encounter the unexpected, no matter how well-known the music …
Filed under: Patricia Kopatchinskaja, review, Seattle Symphony, Thomas Dausgaard
January 20, 2020 • 8:37 am Comments Off on Patricia Kopatchinskaja Comes to Town
Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja returns to Seattle next week for concerts on Jan. 29-30 and Feb. 1. (Marco Borggreve)
My story about the matchless Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who comes to Seattle for a recital and concerts with the Seattle Symphony and Thomas Dausgaard:
Her Seattle Symphony debut drew blood. In April 2016, when Patricia Kopatchinskaja reached the final movement of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, her violin’s shoulder rest came loose. The screw that should have held it in place dug into her neck, breaking the skin. But the music wasn’t over yet.
Filed under: Kurtág, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, preview, Shostakovich, violinists
June 15, 2018 • 2:55 pm Comments Off on Bye Bye Beethoven
Last night at Zellerbach Hall, Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s remarkable staged concert,Bye Bye Beethoven, opened the Berkeley edition of the programs she just curated for the 2018 Ojai Festival. One of the most creative deconstructions I’ve seen in a while, one that really achieves what it sets out to do: to shake us out of the stupor of the safe concert routine and show us what we’ve been missing.
According to Kopatchinskaja, “the concert routine around the world is so absurd,” continually replaying the same icons “with not very much imagination relevant to our time.” Bye Bye Beethoven dramatizes her concern “about petrified traditions. I don’t think Beethoven would be happy to know that in the future his music would take so much space.”
It’s not iconoclasm—ultimately, a Puritan approach—but rather a wittily inventive transformation of perceptions that motivates Bye Bye Beethoven.
This is the kind of work being done all the time in the visual arts, in poetry, in fiction, in film. Why can’t we have more of it in concert life?
Filed under: Cal Performances, directors, Patricia Kopatchinskaja
May 2, 2018 • 8:17 am Comments Off on Patricia Kopatchinskaja Comes to California
Patricia Kopatchinskaja is an ideal choice to be this year’s music director of the Ojai Festival. In advance of the festival’s northern edition, Ojai at Berkeley, here’s my profile of this incomparable artist for Cal Performances:
Matters of technical proficiency are well accounted for in the arsenal of words that critics have at their disposal to describe what sets a musician apart. What is sorely lacking is …
Filed under: Cal Performances, Ojai Festival, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, profile, violinists
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