Patricia Kopatchinskaja

In period-instrument environments, she uses a violin by Ferdinando Gagliano (Naples, ca. 1780, mounted with a lowered bridge and gut Strings) and appropriate bows.

Kopatchinskaja has given first performances of numerous works, e.g.:

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

Kopatchinskaja plays a violin by Giovanni Francesco Pressenda (Turin) in 1834, which The Strad 's Dennis Rooney called "a very colourful-sounding instrument whose viola-like quality lent her playing exceptional tonal interest".

The Raga Piloo was composed, performed and recorded by Ravi Shankar as a duet with Yehudi Menuhin on the album West Meets East, Volume 2 in 1968.

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.

She also has performed with Sir Roger Norrington and Roy Goodman.

Kopatchinskaja has been outspoken in her support of new works and living composers, as well as works not considered part of the standard violin repertoire.

She has performed and recorded works by Luca Francesconi, Francisco Coll García, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Sanchez-Chiong, Stefano Gervasoni, Simone Movio, Michael Hersch, Esa Pekka Salonen, Péter Eötvös, Heinz Holliger, and Michel van der Aa.

Her "Time and Eternity" program with Camerata Bern, recorded for Alpha Classics, featured music by John Zorn, Ikonnikow, Tadeusz Sygietynski, Machaut, and Bach, along with Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Concerto Funebre.

Kopatchinskaja uses the voice in several compositions, including John Cage's Living Room Music, Jorge Sanchez-Chiong's Crin, Michael Hersch's Duo for violin and cello Das Rückgrat berstend, Heinz Holliger's Das kleine Irgendwas, her own cadenza for György Ligeti's Violin Concerto, and Otto Zykan's Das mit der Stimme.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja (born March 1977) is a Moldovan-Austrian-Swiss violinist.

Kopatchinskaja was born in Chișinău, in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Moldova).

She comes from a family of musicians.

Her parents were both with the state folk ensemble of Moldova: her mother, Emilia Kopatchinskaja, was a violinist, and her father, Viktor Kopatchinsky, was 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 fled to Vienna.

Kopatchinskaja entered the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna at age 17, where she studied musical composition and violin.

From age 21 to 23, she finished her studies in Bern, at the Musikhochschule, where her teachers included Igor Ozim.

Kopatchinskaja, her Swiss neurologist husband, and their daughter live in Bern, Switzerland.

From 2003 to 2005 Kopatchinskaja organised the Rüttihubeliade festival in the Swiss Alps.

In 2010, she briefly played the 1741 "ex-Carrodus" violin by Guarneri del Gesù, on loan from the Austrian National Bank but had to give it back because of unresolvable problems with Swiss customs authorities.

In 2014, the British Royal Philharmonic Society gave Kopatchinskaja one of its annual Music Awards in the instrumentalist category, calling her an "irresistible force of nature: passionate, challenging and totally original in her approach".

Kopatchinskaja has played with most of the important European orchestras including Vienna, Berlin and London Philharmonic.

She regularly plays in Japan and Australia and recently also extended her activity to the United States, South America, Russia and China.

She has ongoing collaborations with conductors including Teodor Currentzis, Péter Eötvös, Iván Fischer, Heinz Holliger, Vladimir Jurowski, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Kirill Petrenko, Sir Simon Rattle and François-Xavier Roth.

Kopatchinskaja's experience as a leader of ensembles and chamber orchestras includes a tour with Britten Sinfonia, repeated tours with Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra and being an artistic partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra since 2014.

Presently she is an artistic partner of the Camerata Bern.

She has organised several staged concert productions, including "Death and the Maiden" with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, "Bye-Bye Beethoven" with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, "Dies Irae" with Lucerne Festival Alumni, and "War and Chips" and "Time and Eternity" with Camerata Bern.

In 2016, Kopatchinskaja wrote an editorial for The Guardian outlining her approach to music and her career and her preference for playing music "from the borders" of the repertoire instead of the standard repertoire of "Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Bruch."

She later said, "Standard pieces should be used only as exceptional, rare elements in programmes. There are enough recordings out there already.… The classical music industry is so far behind. If someone does anything that’s even just a tiny bit different, it becomes a huge, heated discussion."

In April 2016, Kopatchinskaja performed with Anoushka Shankar at a concert in Konzerthaus Berlin, Germany.

In 2017, Kopatchinskaja performed the voice part (Sprechgesang) in Arnold Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire in the USA and since 2018 has performed the piece many times with, among others, members of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Montreal and Göteborg Symphonies, and her own ensemble.

In June 2018, she was the music director of the Ojai Music Festival in California.

Regular chamber music partners include cellist Sol Gabetta, clarinettist Reto Bieri and the pianists Joonas Ahonen, Markus Hinterhäuser, Polina Leschenko and Anthony Romaniuk.

In 2018–19, Kopatchinskaja and some friends made a film based on Kurt Schwitters's Dadaistic nonsense poem "Ursonate" (1932).

It has been shown at several festivals.