Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s thirst for discovery ranges from the renaissance to world premieres, most recently of the violin concertos of Marton Illes and Francisco Coll (both in 2020). She has also taken on vocal roles, including Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which she has performed with the Berliner Philharmoniker, among others. She recently made a film of Kurt Schwitters’s Dadaistic Ursonate.

Kopatchinskaja wants to allow music to be experienced here and now in a new way, notably by creating a context for it or staging it. In Hamburg in 2016, along with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, she reacted to the sclerotic state of the concert business with the project ‘Bye-Bye Beethoven’, followed in 2017 at the Lucerne Festival by the project ‘Dies Irae’ in response to the environmental crisis; both programmes were revived on both sides of the Atlantic. The project ‘Death and the Maiden’ with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in the USA also toured Europe, and the CD on the Alpha label won a Grammy Award in 2018. With the Camerata Bern she has realised the projects ‘War and Chips’, ‘Maria Mater Meretrix’ and ‘Time and Eternity’, which was also issued on CD in 2019. Patricia Kopatchinskaja has so far made twenty-seven CDs with such artists as Gidon Kremer and Teodor Currentzis. Her most recent release is ‘What’s Next Vivaldi?’ with Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini.