Patkop & Say

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and pianist Fazıl Say present themselves here as performers and as composers, reviving the tradition of Bach, Mozart and Bartók, who both wrote and played. As Jenny Berg’s liner essay argues, composing and performing are not separate activities for them. Both are ways of questioning and responding to the world, and the four works carry that conversation across a century.

Say’s Lost Screams Sonata, written for Kopatchinskaja, is his response to the struggles and silent protests of the present, with lyrical, introspective moments set against dramatic outcries. Szymanowski’s Mythes, Op. 30 (1915) follows with three colourful visions of Greek myth: La Fontaine d’Arethuse, Narcisse and Dryades et Pan. Kopatchinskaja’s own UniSolo, composed under the name PatKop, is a work “together, yet like soloists.” It starts from the tuning note A and lets a musical process unfold without a known destination, with the violin as narrator and the piano answering with provocations, Morse-code motifs and fist-struck clusters. The programme closes with Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 80, begun in 1938 and finished in 1946 under Stalinist pressure. Kopatchinskaja hears in it a direct connection to today. Recorded at the new La Source Vive in Évian-les-Bains, the album plays the repertoire as an ongoing dialogue between creator and interpreter.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin
Fazıl Say, piano