Patricia Kopatchinskaja
violin
Fazil Say
piano
09.08.2022 – 21:00
Palazzo Sangiovanni
Alessano (LECCE)
Patricia Kopatchinskaja
Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s thirst for discovery ranges from the renaissance to world premieres, most recently of the violin concertos of Marton Illes and Francisco Coll (both In 2020). She has also taken on vocal roles, including Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which she has performed with the Berliner Philharmoniker, among others. She recently made a film of Kurt Schwitters’s dadaistic Ursonate.
Kopatchinskaja wants to allow music to be experienced here and now in a new way, notably by creating a context for it or staging it. In Hamburg in 2016, along with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, she reacted to the sclerotic state of the concert business with the project ‘Bye-Bye Beethoven’, followed in 2017 at the Lucerne festival by the project ‘Dies irae’ in response to the environmental crisis; both programmes were revived on both sides of the Atlantic.
The project ‘Death and the Maiden’ with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in the USA also toured Europe, and the CD on the Alpha label won a Grammy award In 2018. With the Camerata Bern she has realised the projects ‘War and Chips’, ‘Maria mater meretrix’ and ‘Time and Eternity’, which was also issued on cd in 2019.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja has so far made twenty-eight CDs with such artists as Gidon Kremer and Teodor Currentzis. Her most recent release is ‘Sol & Pat’ with cellist Sol Gabetta.
Fazil Say
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.
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.