Patricia Kopatchinskaja & Fazıl Say
Biographie Patricia Kopatchinskaja & Fazıl Say
Patricia Kopatchinskaja
Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s versatility shows itself in her diverse repertoire, ranging from baroque and classical often played on gut strings, to new commissions and re-interpretations of modern masterworks. Kopatchinskaja’s 2017/18 season commences with the world premiere of her new project Dies Irae at the Lucerne Festival where she will be ‘artiste étoile’. Dies Irae is her second staged programme following the success of Bye Bye Beethoven with Mahler Chamber Orchestra in 2016, and uses the theme from the Latin Requiem Mass as a starting point for her new concept featuring music from Gregorian Chant and Early Baroque to Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustwolskaja. The North American premiere will take place at the Ojai Festival in June 2018 where Ms. Kopatchinskaja will be Music Director. György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto is again a feature of Kopatchinskaja’s season – she will perform it with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the Enescu Festival in Bucharest under Rafael Payare, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, and Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon as part of the Southbank Centre’s Ligeti weekend where she will also perform the Horn Trio with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Marie-Luise Neunecker. The Stravinsky Violin Concerto will also be a prominent work which she will perform with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Alain Altinoglu in London, on tour around Europe, with Teodor Currentzis and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and with Gustavo Gimeno and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.
Last season’s highlights included Kopatchinskaja as Artist in Residence at four major European venues and festivals: at the Berlin Konzerthaus, the Lucerne Festival, London’s Wigmore Hall and the Kissinger Sommer Festival. She also embarked on two major European tours; with Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg under Gustavo Gimeno and with Wiener Symphoniker and Musica Aeterna both under the baton of Teodor Currentzis. She performed the Ligeti Violin Concerto with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker, Filharmonica della Scala under Andrés Orozco-Estrada, and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Jukka-Pekka Saraste. She also made her debut with the Gothenburg Symphony and Peter Eötvös performing his Violin Concerto DoReMi. Continuing her regular collaboration with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, she appeared with them in London and New York under Vladimir Jurowski.
Chamber music is immensely important to Kopatchinskaja and she performs regularly with artists such as Markus Hinterhäuser, Polina Leschenko, Anthony Romaniuk and Jay Campbell appearing at such leading venues as the Berlin Konzerthaus, London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna Konzerthaus and Concertgebouw Amsterdam. She is also an Artistic Partner with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and performs with the ensemble regularly, both in Saint Paul and internationally. They undertook a major European tour together in November 2016, to coincide with the release of a new CD recording of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. In 2017/18 she will partner with cellist Jay Campbell in an eclectic programme at New York City’s Armory in October, and for a series of recitals around Europe with pianist Polina Leschenko including London’s Wigmore Hall, Berlin’s Boulez Saal and the Vienna Konzerthaus.
A prolific recording artist, the last few seasons have seen a number of major releases; an album of Kancheli’s music with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica, a disc of duos entitled TAKE TWO on Alpha Classics, a recording of Schumann’s Violin Concerto and Fantasy with WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln under Heinz Holliger for Audite, and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Teodor Currentzis and Musica Aeterna on the Sony label. Kopatchinskaja’s release for Naïve Classique featuring concerti by Bartók, Ligeti and Peter Eötvös won Gramophone’s Recording of the Year Award in 2013, an ECHO Klassik Award and a 2014 Grammy nomination. Her latest release Death and the Maiden, for Alpha with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has received great critical acclaim.
Fazıl Say
With his extraordinary pianistic talents, Fazıl Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more than twenty-five years, in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organised classical music world. Concerts with this artist are something different. They are more direct, more open, more exciting; in short, they go straight to the heart. Which is exactly what the composer Aribert Reimann thought in 1986 when, during a visit to Ankara, he had the opportunity, more or less by chance, to appreciate the playing of the sixteen-year-old pianist. He immediately asked the American pianist David Levine, who was accompanying him on the trip, to come to the city’s conservatory, using the now much-quoted words: ‘You absolutely must hear him, this boy plays like a devil.’
Fazıl Say had his first piano lessons from Mithat Fenmen, who had himself studied with Alfred Cortot in Paris. Perhaps sensing just how talented his pupil was, Fenmen asked the boy to improvise every day on themes to do with his daily life before going on to complete his essential piano exercises and studies. This contact with free creative processes and forms are seen as the source of the immense improvisatory talent and the aesthetic outlook that make Fazıl Say the pianist and composer he is today. He has been commissioned to write music for, among others, the Salzburger Festspiele, the WDR and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, the Festspiele Mecklenburg- Vorpommern, the Konzerthaus Wien, the Dresdner Philharmonie, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the BBC. His oeuvre includes four symphonies, two oratorios, various solo concertos and numerous works for piano and chamber music.
From 1987 onwards, Fazıl Say fine-tuned his skills as a classical pianist with David Levine, first at the Musikhochschule “Robert Schumann” in Düsseldorf and later in Berlin. In addition, he regularly attended master classes with Menahem Pressler. His outstanding technique very quickly enabled him to master the so-called warhorses of the repertoire with masterful ease. It is precisely this blend of refinement (in Bach, Haydn and Mozart) and virtuoso brilliance in the works of Liszt, Mussorgsky and Beethoven that gained him victory at the Young Concert Artists international competition in New York in 1994. Since then he has played with all of the renowned American and European orchestras and numerous leading conductors, building up a multifaceted repertoire ranging from Bach, through the Viennese Classics (Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) and the Romantics, right up to contemporary music, including his own piano compositions.
Guest appearances have taken Fazıl Say to countless countries on all five continents; the French newspaper “Le Figaro” called him ‘a genius’. He also performs chamber music regularly: for many years he was part of a fantastic duo with the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Other notable collaborators include Maxim Vengerov, the Minetti Quartet, Nicolas Altstaedt and Marianne Crebassa.
From 2005 to 2010, he was artist in residence at the Konzerthaus Dortmund; during the 2010/11 season he held the same position at the Konzerthaus Berlin. Fazıl Say was also a focal point of the programme of the Schleswig- Holstein Musik Festival in the summer of 2011. There have been further residencies and Fazıl Say festivals in Paris, Tokyo, Meran, Hamburg, and Istanbul. During the 2012/13 season Fazıl Say was the artist in residence at the hr- Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt and at the Rheingau Musik Festival 2013, where he was honoured with the Rheingau Musik Preis. In April 2015 Fazıl Say gave a successful concert with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York, followed by a tour with concerts throughout Europe. In 2014 he was artist in residence at the Bodenseefestival, where he played 14 concerts. During their 2015/2016 season the Alte Oper Frankfurt and the Zürcher Kammerorchester invited him to be their Artist in Residence, he spent three seasons as Artist in Residence at the Festival der Nationen in Bad Wörishofen and was Composer in Residence at the Dresdner Philharmonie in 2018/19.
In December 2016, Fazıl Say was awarded the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights, Peace, Freedom, Poverty Reduction and Inclusion, in Bonn. In the autumn of 2017, he was awarded the Music Prize of the city of Duisburg.
His recordings of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin and Stravinsky with Teldec Classics as well as Mussorgsky, Beethoven and his own works with the label naïve have been highly praised by critics and won several prizes, including three ECHO Klassik Awards. In 2014, his recording of Beethoven’s piano concerto No. 3 (with hr- Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt / Gianandrea Noseda) and Beethoven’s sonatas op. 111 and op. 27/2 Moonlight was released, as well as the CD ‘Say plays Say’, featuring his compositions for piano. Since 2016 Fazıl Say is an exclusive Warner Classics artist. In the autumn of 2016, his recording of all of Mozart sonatas was released on that label, for which, in 2017, Fazıl Say received his fourth ECHO Klassik award. Together with Nicolas Altstaedt, he recorded the album “4 Cities” (2017). In autumn 2017 Warner Classics released the Nocturnes Frédéric Chopins and the album “Secrets” with French songs, which he recorded together with Marianne Crebassa and which won the Gramophone Classical Music Award in 2018. His 2018 album is dedicated to Debussy and Satie, whilst with his most recent recording “Troy Sonata – Fazıl Say Plays Say” he presents only his own works.
