I just ran across this in The Spectator and I can't resist sharing with you:
The previous Friday, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and pianist Joonas Ahonen played at Milton Court, and if you’re instinctively wary of PatKop’s cult following I can only say that she walked on in plain black and launched into Schoenberg’s 1949-vintage Phantasy with a vibrato so rich that this determinedly knotty music felt as sensuous (and as generous) as Strauss. There’s no timbre that Kopatchinskaja can’t draw from that violin of hers. She created echoing spaces around a tiny, wire-thin scrap of metallic tone in Webern’s Four Pieces, and dismantled and reassembled Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata like some constructivist sculpture.
The house was packed, and it wanted encores. Kopatchinskaja exploded, shrieking, into a movement from Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. More! She challenged us to guess the composer of a Schubert-ish salon piece – a tiny lemon-drop of a thing – and said we couldn’t leave till we’d got it. ‘Xenakis!’ shouted some wag. ‘Mendelssohn’ ventured another, and then everyone was at it while Kopatchinskaja kept shaking her head and waving her bow: ‘No! No! No!’ It turned out to be an unpublished work by the 17-year-old Gyorgy Ligeti, and reader, I called it.
I've been talking about PatKop a few times lately and this is the best description I have seen of her playing. Here she is with the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. Yes, she can play the core repertoire:
No comments:
Post a Comment