‘Something should happen in a concert,” says Patricia Kopatchinskaja. “I don’t know what. But every time, I’m expecting a miracle. I’m not very humble about this!” If audiences have learned to expect inspiring and surprising things from this restless and unpredictable violinist, that’s nothing compared to the standards she sets for herself. On stage, Kopatchinskaja is an impish presence, a coiled spring that could unwind in any direction. In conversation, she talks seriously and softly, yet every so often an idea forms that especially pleases her and her eyes get a mischievous glint – a look that, in performance, means she and her fellow musicians are indeed about to make something happen.
The musician is happiest at the centre of eclectic ensemble programmes that encourage us to listen actively and to be delighted, provoked or even scared: programmes that blur the lines between music and theatre. The latest example, with which she continues her residency at London’s Southbank Centre on 24 April, is Everyday Non-sense, which she has devised to play with Aurora, the UK orchestra known for mixing up the standard concert format and often playing whole works from memory. It’s billed as “a concert-theatre experience that transforms the stage into a living room”: one publicity photo shows Kopatchinskaja crouched next to a washing machine – she might be about to put a load on, or pick it up and hurl it across the room.
The aim of Everyday Non-sense, she says, is “to forget about stage and audience, to mix together and experience the absurdity, with humour and with sarcasm”. The music includes pieces by Cage, Mozart, Schnittke, Kurtág, George Brecht and Kopatchinskaja herself, along with Mysteries of the Macabre – arrangements from Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre of arias for the chief of the secret police, a stratospherically high soprano role. Who’s going to sing these? Kopatchinskaja herself, of course. “I just do it! If I want to do a piece, I will find a way, somehow. I don’t think we need a conservatory or a diploma to become professionals. Actually, I don’t like to be professional. It’s better to be in between. And then you have so many more possibilities, everything is open. I move between the lines.” She laughs. “There’s so much more space there.”
Kopatchinskaja was born in Chișinău in Moldova, to musician parents who both played with the state folk ensemble – her mother as a violinist, her father as a cimbalom player. She got her first violin aged six. “My mother said I started making the right movements with it straight away. It was really like my doll or something, my game.”
Over the next few years, the political and economic situation in Moldova grew worse and worse – Kopatchinskaja remembers musicians in the state orchestra playing in black armbands to protest about not having been paid for months. Eventually, her parents felt the family had no choice but to leave. She was 12 when they moved to Vienna. By this time, Kopatchinskaja was already composing a lot of music, but in Austria, encountering the likes of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, the Second Viennese School, “was an explosion in my mind. It opened all my senses – I was fascinated.”
One of the works she discovered was Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, his moonstruck cabaret in which the vocalist sings and swoops and speaks in their own weird and expressionist world. “I played violin and viola in the ensemble of Pierrot, many times. And then I would find myself speaking the text along with the singer. So I thought, ‘One day, when I have time, I will learn to sing this piece.’” She did – and it’s now in her repertoire. She released a recording in 2021, and performed it as part of her Southbank residency last December.
The figure of Pierrot – the often mute outsider, the “holy fool” – is something she clearly feels artists should have an affinity with. “Every poet and painter and artist and person with fantasy has this side – a childish side, which allows everything; a wide, empty page. Pierrot is an observer. He can be dangerous. He is subversive. In 19th-century Paris, even by appearing on stage saying nothing, he was a sign that we are here, we stand for something.”
Now, she says, “All my attention goes to new music. I listen every day – I’m searching on YouTube, always looking for something new.” As for “old” music, from whichever era, which she weaves into her programmes alongside the new, she says: “The question is: why are we playing it again? In earlier times, people didn’t play music that they already knew. I mean, in baroque times, the opera houses went bankrupt if they didn’t have several premieres every season. Today is the opposite: if you have only premieres, you have to close. We have to turn it around, make the direction forwards not backwards.”
Where does that leave the folk music she grew up with, though? Isn’t that about taking something old and doing it again, according to the way you feel today? “Yes, but not to dance with the dead! It’s to dance with people who are alive! That’s the big difference. It’s really a very direct thing. I play now for you.” She looks me straight in the eye and points four times for emphasis: “I. Play. Now. For you. And it’s a different thing that I played yesterday in Paris for somebody else. I take it very personally. And even if I don’t play well, I try my best!”
Kopatchinskaja last appeared with Aurora in Dies Irae, a programme of music responding to the climate crisis and the displacement it causes. She sees it as a way of reaching people unmoved by facts and numbers, having seen close up the difficulties of effecting change: her ex-husband, the father of her teenage daughter, is a retired neurologist who had been a politician in the Swiss Green party. Dies Irae is built around the unsparing piece of the same name by Galina Ustvolskaya, and also includes George Crumb’s Black Angels: it’s an exciting, provocative programme that must be exhausting to rehearse and perform.
“But it’s more exhausting to play pieces that are meaningless to me,” she counters. When that happens – as it unavoidably does sometimes – she works at finding something in the music to connect with: “It has to have an echo in what is happening today. Otherwise I’m a product of a museum. Playing the same piece hundreds of times the same way, it’s like buying a souvenir from a museum shop. It doesn’t really have any value to me.”
Kopatchinskaja would like to do more theatrical projects, but not with the instrumentalists in the pit. “I don’t like seeing musicians in a hole in the opera. I want them put on stage.” Nor is she jumping at the chance to work with directors. “I don’t like advice!” she jokes. She does, however, like input from her fellow performers. “When I work with musicians, I have a plan. But still, we always adjust. If somebody says, ‘I don’t like it’, then they can propose something else.” Can that proposal come from absolutely anyone, not just the leaders of the group? “Yes. Yes, please.”
Perhaps it’s that collaborative approach that keeps ensembles asking Kopatchinskaja back. She has already performed Dies Irae with several, including the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow during Cop26. She is, of course, aware that there’s a nonsensical aspect to this, too – flying around the world to perform a programme warning of climate catastrophe. “I say I try my best, but no, it’s not my best. My best would be to stay somewhere and play in a kindergarten, teach.”
What stops her? She hesitates. “I have the sense that I have to tell people something very important. But when I feel it’s not like this, I will stop.”