Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Variously described as "the most exciting violinist in the world" and "the wild child of the violin", Patricia Kopatchinskaja's sense of adventure and versatility has seen her playing with many of the world's leading orchestras, attracting great acclaim along the way. Living by the mantra "It's my plan to have no plan", the maverick violinist has blown away the conventions and boundaries of traditional chamber music to become known as a bare-footed, free-spirited wild child of the classical world.

Born in Chisnau, Moldova, her parents were both members of the Joc Dance Ensemble which toured the Eastern Bloc playing the region's folk and dance music, and Kopatchinskaja followed in her mother's footsteps and took up the violin aged six whilst growing up with her grandmother. When the family moved to Austria, Kopatchinskaja and her mother played in restaurants for loose change, but by the age of 17 she had gained a scholarship to study violin and composition at the Vienna Academy of Music and in 2002 she won the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award. The prize was an important launching pad for her career and she went on to become recognised as an outstanding soloist thanks to early tours with Irina Schnittke's piano trio and performances with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Though steeped in the icons of classical music and admired for her sensual recordings of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, it was her interpretations of more modern composers that marked her out from the crowd and she won Recording of the Year at the Gramophone Awards in 2013 for her album of works by Hungarians Bela Bartók, Peter Eotvos and Gyorgy Ligeti.

Her take on Russian Galina Ustvolskaja's dark, uncompromising pieces for record label ECM was seen as another startling move, and while working with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in 2016, she mixed 17th Century composer Heinrich Biber's military march 'Battalia' with avant-garde music maker George Crumb's melancholy impression of the Vietnam War 'Black Angels'. The album 'Take Two' was also a high point in 2015 and she performed live with sitar player Anoushka Shankar the following year, before winning the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance in 2018 for 'Death & The Maiden', her exploration of Schubert's 'String Quartet in D Minor'.