PatKop & Say album review – playfulness and beguiling delicacy in mix of new and old

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say have recorded Say’s music together before, but this is their first recording to feature Kopatchinskaja as a composer as well, but this is no vanity project: Say’s and Kopatchinskaja’s pieces make good complements to Szymanowski’s three Mythes and Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No 1.

Say’s Lost Screams Sonata is driven by repeated piano rhythms, its fierceness tempered by an episode in which Kopatchinskaja plays low, ghostly harmonics and Say gently plucks the strings of the piano so it almost sounds like a second violin. Kopatchinskaja’s three-movement piece UniSolo is an impish work with a searching, thoughtful playfulness that comes from the parallel world to the Kurtág miniatures she plays so well.

These two frame a haunting performance of Mythes that embraces the strange sumptuousness of these pieces, with playing of beguiling delicacy from both musicians. With an even bigger scope, Prokofiev’s wartime Sonata No 1 has moments in which Kopatchinskaja turns her tone almost ugly, even in places where other violinists might choose to soar heroically. Each of these works pushes at the edges of what the violin can do, and casts the instrument in a kind of narrative role: Kopatchinskaja, who always looks to play the storyteller, seizes upon these qualities with relish.