Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Life and career

Kopatchinskaja was born in Chișinău, Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union. She comes from a family of musicians; her parents were both musicians with the state folk ensemble of Moldova, with her mother Emilia Kopatchinskaja a violinist and her father Viktor Kopatchinsky a cimbalom player. While her parents were on concert tour through the former Eastern bloc, she grew up with her grandparents. She started playing the violin at age 6.

In 1989, the family emigrated to Vienna. Kopatchinskaja entered the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna at age 17, where she studied musical composition and violin. At age 21, she won a scholarship to study in Bern, at the Musikhochschule, where her teachers included Igor Ozim. Kopatchinskaja, her Swiss neurologist husband, and their daughter live in Bern, Switzerland. She plays a violin built by Giovanni Francesco Pressenda (Turin) in 1834.

Soloist

Kopatchinskaja has played with many important European orchestras including Vienna, Berlin and London Philharmonic. She regularly plays in Japan and Australia and recently also extended her activiy to the United States, South America, Russia and China. She has an ongoing collaboration with amongst others the following conductors: Teodor Currentzis, Péter Eötvös, Iván Fischer, Heinz Holliger, Vladimir Jurowski, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Kirill Petrenko und Sir Simon Rattle. In February 2014, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra named Kopatchinskaja one of its new Artistic Partners, effective with the 2014-2015 season and prolonged in 2017. And in 2018 she will serve as artistic director of the Ojai Music Festival in the USA.

Chamber music partners

Regular chamber music partners include cellist Sol Gabetta and the pianists Fazil Say, Markus Hinterhäuser and Polina Leschenko.

On 23 April 2016 she performed with Anoushka Shankar at a concert in Konzerthaus Berlin, Germany.

Historically informed performance

Patricia Kopatchinskaja has collaborated with Il Giardino Armonico, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, MusicAeterna Perm, the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under the direction of Giovanni Antonini, René Jacobs and Philippe Herreweghe.

First performances

Kopatchinskaja gave first performances of numerous works, e.g.:

Moreover, Richard Carrick, Violeta Dinescu, Michalis Economou, Heinz Holliger, Ludwig Nussbichler, Jorge Sánchez-Chiong, Ivan Sokolov, Boris Yoffe have written works for her.

Awards