Patricia Kopatchinskaja - Take Two - LA Times

“Take Two” covers a full millennium of music. Some of it will be familiar to most listeners. Some of it, not at all. And all 24 tracks in Kopatchinskaja’s hands made a startling surprise. She has eight partners here in her musical crimes playing ancient treble viol, turntables, guitar, harpsichord, toy piano, clarinet, ocarina and darbuka (an African drum). One number follows another in seemingly incoherent fashion. First an 11th century trope for violin and viol, then some untamed electronics by Venezuelan avant-gardist Jorge Sanchez-Chiong, then an excerpt from John Cage’s gentle Six Melodies for Violin and Piano.

Let’s take the Cage for a minute. Kopatchinskaja replaces the piano with harpsichord. She plays this tidy and serene Satie-like miniature aggressively, messily distorting tone and time, the heavily amplified harpsichord adding a palate of unexpected new sound effects.

Cage is one of the two patron saints of Kopatchinskaja’s “Take Two” enterprise (Alice, she of Wonderland, is the other). Cage is quoted throughout the violinist’s inventively loopy liner notes. “Consider everything an experiment,” is one example. Heaven only knows what the composer would have made of this performance, but I would like to think he would have delighted realizing he asked for it.

There’s lots more — Milhaud, De Falla, Machaut, Martinu. A performance of a sonata by Biber, the Baroque weirdo, must be heard to be believed. There are instances of childish glee and others sincere spirituality. The final track is Bach’s beloved D-Minor Chaconne, accompanied by Anthony Romaniuk improvising on the harpsichord, and made to seem simultaneously new and timeless.