Patricia Kopatchinskaja
Time & Eternity
★★★☆☆
Black Oak Ensemble
Silenced Voices
★★★★☆
The disembodied head of Patricia Kopatchinskaja — or, in modern parlance, PatKop — stares out of the album cover alongside a disembodied violin. Open the booklet and she’s resting her hands on a skull. Here is a programme, the maverick violinist tells us, “made out of the blood and tears of tortured souls”, concerning “us, our past and our future”, unveiled last year with Camerata Bern in the city’s French Church, lit by 700 candles.
I can easily imagine the original power of Kopatchinskaja’s sonic tapestry, an elaborate weave of two pain-stricken 20th-century violin concertos, liturgical chanting, a Kol Nidre setting by the usually madcap John Zorn, and instrumental transcriptions of this and