In classical music, we think we know how the great pieces go. We hear these standards so often — they have formed our ears so thoroughly — that it can be hard to imagine why some of them were resisted when they were new. Take Tchaikovsky’s beloved Violin Concerto, which endears us with its graceful lyricism and good spirits.
Not when Patricia Kopatchinskaja plays it.
Kopatchinskaja, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut on Wednesday, released a recording of the Tchaikovsky in 2016. The performance is bracing and even manic, pressing toward extremes of loud and soft, fast and slow. Kopatchinskaja’s violin often sounds raw and wiry; she plays as if she’s improvising on a fiddle at a sweaty barn dance.
For once, you understand what the 19th-century critic Eduard Hanslick was talking about when he panned the piece as “stink one can hear.” “The violin is no longer played,” he wrote. “It is pulled about, torn, beaten black and blue.”
Kopatchinskaja doesn’t always beat music black and blue. She can reduce her sound to a fragile whisper, or honey her tone into sweetness:
But she always strips away the fat, giving canonical works a breathing — indeed, panting — vitality. She grounds decorous masterpieces in the earthiness of Central European folk traditions.
She doesn’t do plush or placid. Pretty? Kopatchinskaja gives you biting wildness.
Born in Moldova in 1977, she moved with her family to Vienna after the fall of the Soviet Union and developed into one of music’s quirkiest stars — and not just because she made a habit of performing barefoot. She has avoided the usual endless tours of Beethoven and Brahms. Instead, with similarly open-minded colleagues, she’s organized a slew of idiosyncratic, time-spanning, sometimes staged thematic programs.
Their mood is often dark. “Dies Irae” evokes war and other catastrophes with works from Gregorian chant to George Crumb. Anchored by Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, “Les Adieux” is a funeral for a warming planet. Religiously infused solemnity emanates from her 2023 album “Maria Mater Meretrix,” a mesmerizing exploration of the figure of Mary in music through the ages.
Kopatchinskaja favors small, agile ensembles like the Camerata Bern of Switzerland, her partner on “Maria Mater Meretrix” and other recent albums. When she works with major orchestras, she tends to play contemporary music or the more modern side of the standard repertory, like Stravinsky’s concerto, which she will perform with the Philharmonic this weekend; its elegant angularity is a perfect fit for her lean sound.
Her appearance in New York should be treasured since she doesn’t play often in the United States. (Her stint as an artistic partner of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota ended in 2018.) But even if you can’t go see her, her recordings convey much of the intense commitment of her live performances.
“Rapsodia” (2010) brought her together with her parents, who played in Moldova’s state folk ensemble: her mother as a violinist and violist and her father on the cimbalom, the twangy Hungarian hammered dulcimer. On the recording, wild folk tunes — almost bluegrassy — are juxtaposed with art music by Enescu and Kurtag and Ravel’s “Tzigane,” with the piano part transcribed for cimbalom.
Personal, adventurous, surprising, charming, throaty, a raucous party that’s somehow rigorous and informal at once: The album is classic Kopatchinskaja.
So is the Tchaikovsky concerto, which she recorded with the equally provocative conductor Teodor Currentzis and MusicAeterna. That take, for all its daring, is more persuasive than some of her early recordings of standards, like a Beethoven “Kreutzer” Sonata so harsh it can make you wince.
The first movement of that “Kreutzer” feels more intent on puncturing listeners’ expectations of the core Classical-Romantic repertory than on offering a better alternative. Music that dances, though, finds Kopatchinskaja at her most irresistible, and she blazes through the sonata’s tarantella finale with rhythmic spiciness and snap.
Her chronology-hopping programs with staged elements, while ambitious by the standards of classical music, can come off a little scrappy and sophomoric in person. When recorded, though, these combinations of old and new, well known and unusual, are far more successful.
“Death and the Maiden” (2016), with the St. Paul orchestra, ingeniously threads Renaissance melodies and some morose Kurtag through a heated ensemble arrangement of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. By alternating Vivaldi concertos with contemporary Italian pieces, “What’s Next Vivaldi?” (2020), with the conductor Giovanni Antonini and his Il Giardino Armonico, offers a new context for Baroque virtuosity.
Kopatchinskaja’s latest collaboration with the Camerata Bern, “Exile,” released in January, has a subtle political charge, featuring works by composers who were — like her — uprooted from their homelands.
The album begins with a scraping scrawl, the start of an arrangement of a folk song originally written for a Ukrainian-Russian variant of pan pipes. It’s not the kind of sound that typically opens a classical music album, and it’s emblematic of why Kopatchinskaja is not to all tastes. Someone in the field once asked me why The New York Times gave so much coverage to a violinist whose playing was so ugly.
But I don’t think it’s ugly. It’s unforgettable.
