“Time & Eternity” by Patricia Kopatchinskaja
„Tohle představení je o nás, “This performance is about us, about our past and our future,” says one of the most original and in-demand artists of our time about the multimedia project Time and Eternity, which will be performed on 16 May at the Rudolfinum: violinist, performer, composer and Prague Spring 2025 Artist-in-Residence Patricia Kopatchinskaja.
The first concert of her Prague Spring residency will combine the seemingly incompatible: instrumental music from six centuries, folk singing, elements of medieval mass, projection and lighting design. On the way home, your ears will be filled with the meditative yet urgent melody Kol Nidre by John Zorn, the beautiful chorale O große Lieb from Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion, or quotations of the famous Hussite song Ye Who Are Warriors of God from Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Concerto funèbre. Your imagination will be stirred by six musical frescoes inspired by paintings from the cycle La Maestà by the medieval Italian master Duccio di Buoninsegna or the apocalyptic Crux for violin, organ and timpani by Luboš Fišer. All this is interspersed with Bach chorales and excerpts from the Messe de Notre-Dame by Guillaume de Machaut, secretary to John of Luxembourg.
“My first teacher was the rain. I listened to the drops. They were the first short, round notes in my childhood imagination. Then came the sun. The notes became longer and more transparent, beginning in the clouds and disappearing into infinity. Wind taught me momentum; the night taught me silence and the suddenness of the morning. From language came phrasing, and with that my dreams opened up into the limitlessness of fantasy…,” says Patricia Kopatchinskaja about herself. It is into this world, whose lifeblood is wonder and where music defies all conventions, that this unique artist will take you together with the Camerata Bern on 16 May at the Rudolfinum.
One of the works on the programme, Frank Martin’s violin concerto Polyptyque, is inspired by six paintings from the cycle La Maestà by the medieval Italian master Duccio di Buoninsegna:
