Tag Archives: Patricia Kopatchinskaja

RSNO / Kopatchinskaja

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s mesmerising performance of Stravinsky’s pyrotechnic Violin Concerto in D with the RSNO last weekend will surely go down as one of the musical highlights of the year. The Moldovan-born violinist is an out-and-out entertainer who couples effortless technical wizardry with the red-hot stage charisma of a rock star. 

Stravinsky’s Concerto, a gauche and febrile display of explosive neoclassicism, requires a stage entrance to match, and Kopatchinskaja’s was the whole package. Barefooted, dressed in an exotic creation, her first chord struck an unquestioning authority from which conductor Thomas Søndergård and the orchestra took a firm lead.

Even when she wasn’t playing, Kopatchinskaja’s physical presence was eye-catching and centre stage, bobbing and jiving to Stravinsky’s edgy rhythms. It was a performance that feverishly illuminated the music’s freneticism, one minute grotesque and anarchic, the next darting and artful, at times even reflective and sensual. The encore – an imagined cadenza for the Stravinsky –  ended as a virtuoso duel between Kopatchinskaja and RSNO leader Sharon Roffman.

With such a tour de force completing the opening half, it was easy to forget that the evening had opened with the world premiere of Carlijn Metselaar’s Into The Living Mountain, written by the Edinburgh-based composer as winner of the RSNO 2019-20 Composer’s Hub Scheme. Based on Nan Shepherd’s eponymous book about her experiences climbing in the Cairngorms, Metselaar captures the landscape’s shifting moods – its mysteries, its beauty, its dangers and austerity – within a well-crafted, free-flowing score.

Søndergård, in a neatly-textured reading, also drew on the music’s slightly archaic charm, a nod to early 20th century modernism in the rawness of its big themes, some of which could so easily attach themselves to a Hitchcock film.  

The fullest forces were reserved for the concert’s second half and the all-consuming passion of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2. If Søndergård chose to conduct this without a baton purposely to delicately handcraft it, he made his point. There was a sensuousness throughout, spaciously affirmative in the opening movement, joyous and radiant in the second, breathtakingly lyrical in the Adagio, and brilliantly conclusive in the finale. 

Ken Walton 

RSNO / Kopatchinskaja

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RSNO Centre, Glasgow

The thought occurred at the end of this adventurous contribution to the cultural programme around COP26 that it is only in very recent times that such an event has been likely to appear on the schedule of the musicians of Scotland’s national orchestra once again. Before that old hands might wistfully recall the SNO’s Musica Nova seasons at the University of Glasgow for any point of comparison.

The architect and soloist of the programme, Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, will return to play the Stravinsky Violin Concerto with the RSNO in February, but here she was leading a chamber ensemble of RSNO players, with a choir of singers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland directed by Tim Dean and groups of trombone and double bass students, also from the Conservatoire.

The sequence of music Kopatchinskaja had the RSNO musicians play required a range of talents far beyond their stringed instrument skills, with a great deal of percussion and performance, bowing of wine glasses and a final, rather moving procession of metronomes and night lights, slowly silenced and extinguished.

That conclusion was perhaps the clearest evocation of the environmental crisis that inspired it. More broadly, this Dies Irae, as the violinist entitled the whole evening, was a statement of opposition to the powerful as much as faith in God or humanity. Interleaving movements from the baroque pictures of Franz Biber’s Battalia with George Crumb’s anti-Vietnam War Black Angels was a colourful enough beginning, but that was only a taste of what was to come.

Re-purposing more early music in Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus motet and John Dowland’s Lachrimae Antiquae Novae on the way, and with those seven trombones prowling the auditorium, the culmination of the evening was Russian Galina Ustwolskaja’s Komposition No.2.

The only woman in Shostakovich’s composition class in her youth, UIstwolskaja lived until the first decade of the new millennium and wrote this, one her most extreme works, in the early 1970s, scored for eight double basses, piano and a large wooden box to be struck with hammers. Kopatchinskaja forsook her fiddle to play the latter, which had been borne onto the stage like a coffin.

The piece is subtitled Dies Irae, but Ustwolskaja’s precise relationship with the Christian faith, during and after the Soviet era, seems unclear. That we were to hear in it a premonition of the end of days was made explicit in the RCS singers following it with Gregorian chant of the Latin, and the entry of all the participants with those randomly clicking metronomes and flickering lights.

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Keith Bruce