“Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, music director of this year’s Ojai Music Festival, running Thursday through June 10, … is one of those transformative musicians who comes along, if we are lucky, once or twice in a generation,” writes Mark Swed in Sunday’s (6/3) Los Angeles Times. “Every day, her festival will be packed from early morning to late night…. There will be a children’s concert and a staged meditation on the dying Earth (‘Dies Irae’ on Saturday), a staged investigation on what Beethoven means today and why we need to move on (‘Bye Bye Beethoven’ on Thursday), as well as much Baroque and earlier music…. Kopatchinskaja will focus on the darkly formidable Soviet composer Galina Ustvolskaya and on the darkly formidable contemporary American composer Michael Hersch…. Her native Moldovan folk music will be played alongside Romanian, Hungarian and Transylvanian 20th century classical pieces.… Her career, other than having been an artistic partner with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra [for] the last four years, has been mostly in Europe…. She has begun performing the vocal part of Schonberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire,’ dressed in a Pierrot costume, and also has been making films.”
Posted June 5, 2018
