‘Forget about stage and audience, to mix and experience the absurdity, with humour and sarcasm’ … Kopitchanskaja performs with the LSO in 2023.‘Forget about stage and audience, to mix and experience the absurdity, with humour and sarcasm’ … Kopitchanskaja performs with the LSO in 2023.
Playing the same piece hundreds of times the same way – it’s like buying a souvenir from a museum shop One of the works she discovered was Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, his moonstruck cabaret in which the vocalist sings and swoops and speaks in their own weird and expressionist world. “I played violin and viola in the ensemble of Pierrot, many times. And then I would find myself speaking the text along with the singer. So I thought, ‘One day, when I have time, I will learn to sing this piece.’” She did – and it’s now in her repertoire.
Where does that leave the folk music she grew up with, though? Isn’t that about taking something old and doing it again, according to the way you feel today? “Yes, but not to dance with the dead! It’s to dance with people who are alive! That’s the big difference. It’s really a very direct thing. I play now for you.” She looks me straight in the eye and points four times for emphasis: “I. Play. Now. For you. And it’s a different thing that I played yesterday in Paris for somebody else.