Kopatchinskaja's new Beethoven CD reviewed in The Times

Patricia Kopatchinskaja
Beethoven
naïve
★★★★

... With Beethoven’s concerto, there’s a far higher pile of CDs to climb. Jansen’s extreme beauty of tone and phrasing is definitely alluring, though it wasn’t until the cadenza in the first movement (she uses Kreisler’s) that I felt her heart had fully opened up. Järvi conducts the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, who play with a period instrument band’s lean thrust and lack of string vibrato; striking in itself, though not always the best setting for [Janine] Jansen’s essentially romantic art.
No such dislocation exists in a rival Beethoven recording from the gifted Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja (the two violin Romances and a separate concerto fragment fill out the disc). Her orchestra and conductor are official “authentic” specialists (Orchèstre des Champs-Elysées, and Phillippe Herreweghe). And she’s slimmed her tone to a fragile finesse, following the reported playing style of the concerto’s first interpreter, Franz Clement.
Beethoven’s autograph score has been studied, too, prompting some changes from the norm.
Not everything is uniformly successful. The concerto’s cadenzas, adapted with overdubbing from Beethoven’s piano adaptation, certainly seem a trick too far. But the freshness of this interpretation is exhilarating, and as bar succeeds bar the soloist certainly beats [Janine] Jansen for edge-of-the-seat excitement.
Four stars for Jansen’s Britten; but in the Beethoven, Kopatchinskaja wins.

Geoff Brown