Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja moves fluidly across mainstream repertoire and historically informed performance while maintaining a strong commitment to new music, a commitment reflected in more than a dozen world premieres she has given to date.

Born in 1977 in Chisinau, then part of the Moldavian Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union, she grew up in a household where her mother, a violinist, and her father, a percussionist, both performed with a regional state folk-music ensemble. She began violin lessons at the age of six under a local instructor who had studied with David Oistrakh. At seventeen the family relocated to Vienna, where she entered the University of Music and the Performing Arts to pursue simultaneous degrees in violin and composition; she later finished her training at the Hochschule für Musik in Bern, Switzerland, under Igor Ozim. She has remained in Bern, raising a family there. Her first commercial recording appeared in 2002 on the Megadisc label, devoted to chamber works by Nikolai Korndorf.

Her concerto engagements encompass the Vienna, Berlin, and London Philharmonic Orchestras among many others. For historically informed projects she relies on a Neapolitan violin made by Ferdinando Gagliano in the 1780s, having earlier returned a 1741 Guarneri del Gesù known as the “ex-Carrodus” because Swiss import regulations proved prohibitive. In the period-instrument sphere she has collaborated with Il Giardino Armonico, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and MusicAeterna in Perm. Chamber-music partners have included cellist Sol Gabetta, clarinetist Reto Bieri, and pianist Markus Hinterhäuser.

Contemporary music occupies a central place in her activities; among the premieres she has presented is her own violin concerto Hortus animae, introduced with Camerata Bern in 2014. She has served as artistic partner of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra since that same year. Administrative responsibilities followed: in 2018 she became artistic director of both Camerata Bern and the Ojai Music Festival in California. Her discography, appearing on Naïve, Audite, ECM, and Alpha, balances traditional and contemporary repertoire in roughly equal measure. On Alpha she issued Time & Eternity with Camerata Bern in 2019 and, two years later, the duo album Sol & Pat with Sol Gabetta. By the time Take 3 appeared in 2024, her catalog had grown to more than thirty releases.