Coming into Saanen Church, you don't immediately notice that the concert has already started. At first, there is just a single bass pedal note, held by the two cellos of Camerata Bern, on the stage. As the audience quietens, melodic phrases from two violins reach us, in waves, from the back of the church. It's the Kol Nidre by John Zorn, an infinite tension between time and eternity, an overture, the announcement of an operatic form that is to come. As Bach placed the audience between two choirs for the premiere of his St Matthew Passion, as Bernini architected St Peter's Square in Rome to welcome the faithful between outstretched arms, so Patricia Kopatchinskaja embraces the audience of the Gstaad Menuhin Festival from the outset of a multi-faceted artistic gesture, profoundly generous and personal, under the sign of faith and transcendence.
The level of originality demonstrated by Kopatchinskaja is welcome in the classical music world but doesn't make life easy for commentators. What have we just seen on Saturday evening in this peaceful, verdant Bernese Oberland valley? Was it a concert? A recital? A musical-visual spectacle? A chamber opera? A political and spiritual plea? For sure, there's something of all of these from the virtuoso violinist, also morphed for the occasion into conductor, stage director and performance artist.
In no way is there any hint of a vulgar pot-pourri, because each moment is infused by faith, an inextinguishable faith carried by the music’s communicative, cathartic and emotional power. You see it in the engagement of a Kopatchinskaja who stretches her instrument to its technical limits with a bow whose horsehair is in shreds by the end of the evening. You see it in the benevolent, conspiratorial looks she bestows on the audience. You see it in the impeccable relays between her and the musicians of Camerata Bern: they become the extension of her arm, of this person who guides them (rather than directs) by simple inclinations of the head. And you see it in the contrasts, so marked, in the narrative lines, so clear, and in her theatricality, so perfectly judged.
The first part, more political than it seems at first sight, attempts to bring together eastern and western slavic cultures, masterfully dissolving the boundary between contemporary music and traditional song. So we see the juxtaposition of the Concerto funebre by Karl Amadeus Harmann (music of mourning inspired by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia) with the Russian revolutionary song Immortal Victims (which is quoted in Hartmann's work), Eliyahu Hanavi (a Jewish song of peace) and the traditional Polish Dwa serduszka. Kopatchinskaja’s violin is first and foremost klezmer or gypsy. The vibrato is extremely tight in the highs, the rhythms are swaying or syncopated, the violin always sings at its tonal or melodic breaking point, either crushed by the bow or barely caressed by it. The humour is there too, in a descending scale or in the orchestra's response. Moist or dry, soft or rough, lyrical or rustic, Kopatchinskaja’s playing matches the sound of the three Polish singers, with their full and characteristic voices, between trills and nasal projections, accompanied by the melancholy accordion of Wieslaw Pipczynski.
The second part takes the form of a profession of faith, introduced by an arrangement mostly in pizzicato of the Kyrie of Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame and then alternating between Bach chorales and the Polyptyque pour violon et deux petits orchestres by Swiss composer Frank Martin. In the background, the projection of paintings from the Passion by Duccio di Buoninsegna (from which the Polyptyque is derived) had all the makings of tedium, but the set-up was convincing because of its simplicity. The Polyptyque is at times narrative ("Image de Gethsémané"), at times evocative of late impressionism ("Image de la Chambre haute"), at times oppressive in a way reminiscent of a Shostakovich quartet ("Image de Judas"). And without a doubt, the climax of this Christian passion is the astonishing Crux de Luboš Fišer, a duet with a percussionist performed in front of Buoninsegna’s crucifixion, where the ostinati of the violin and the long crescendo of the timpani seize us with dread.