Kopatchinskaja interview in December issue of BBC Music Magazine

Rising star: Great Artists of Tomorrow

Patricia Kopatchinskaja - Violinist

The brilliant young Moldovan is on a mission to champion the new and unpredictable. And that includes Beethoven...

Patricia Kopatchinskaja is probably tired of showing people where her homeland is on a map. So, for the record, Moldova lies between Romania and the Ukraine. Best known for its wine, it is also, says the 32-year-old violinist, an intensely musical country. 'The folk music of Moldova is beautiful,' she tells us. 'You can compare it with Hungarian, Romanian or even Scottish folk. My mother used to say that the country is so poor that God looked down at the globe and decided he had to send us something as consolation - and that was music.'

The daughter of folk musicians herself, Kopatchinskaja originally wanted to be a composer but, she reflects, 'composing is like selling umbrellas in the Sahara. I had to earn money, and playing the violin was the way to do that.'

Composing's loss was the violin's gain. And how. With her deep, rich sound - one reviewer observed that she produces an almost viola-like warmth of tone - Kopatchinskaja has won many fans, not least when, with regular recital partners pianists Fazil Say and Mihaela Ursuleasa, she blazes away in folk-infused works by, say, Enescu, Ravel and Bartók.

But there is more to her than East European fireworks, as her new disc of Beethoven's Violin Concerto reveals. For this, she went back to basics, examining the composer's original score, in which Beethoven used four different staves for the soloist's part so that he could toy with alternative approaches. 'I was amazed by how many variants that Beethoven wrote down - often two or three,' she explains, 'I asked myself "Why not try one or two of these other possibilities that he thought about?". I wanted to try this with conductor Philippe Herreweghe, who agreed it was very interesting. Step by step, it became very new, almost like a world premiere. It had a new face, a new story'.

A player who likes to champion 'unpredictable' contemporary composers, there is little danger of Kopatchinskaja ever drifting into predictability herself. Her next disc after Beethoven? Enescu sonatas and Ravel's Tzigane... plus Moldovan folk music, played with her own parents! If that doesn't put her country's music on the map, nothing will.

Interview by Jeremy Pound