The basic idea of this album was to play in threes… Not to play 'something', but to experiment 'in threes' with sound worlds as different as those of Bartok, Poulenc and Schoenfield. With hisContrastes, composed in 1938 for Benny Goodman, Bartok broadened his penchant for traditional music and turned it into a more universal work, influenced by jazz. Poulenc was a child of the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, influenced as much by Stravinsky, Ravel and Satie as by cabaret songs and operetta. Paul Schoenfield, born in Detroit in 1947, also likes to combine styles. Each of the movements in his trio is based on an Eastern European Hasidic melody…not forgetting the breathtaking klezmer dances of Romanian Serban Nichifor.Almost ten years afterTake 2(Alpha211), Patricia Kopatchinskaja reunites with two great accomplices, clarinettist Reto Bieri and pianist Polina Leschenko, for a programme based around trios that celebrate the roots of these three musicians.

For her third album on Alpha, Patricia Kopatchinskaja is joined by a highly talented pianist whose approach to music is as extremist as hers, Polina Leschenko. Together they explore pieces that have many points in common. The Hungarian violinist Jelly dAranyi, grandniece of Joseph Joachim, was a muse to both Bartok and Ravel. In 1922 and 1923, she premiered the two Bartok sonatas for violin and piano and Ravel dedicated Tzigane to her. He wrote to Bartok: You have convinced me to compose for our friend, who plays so fluently, a little piece whose diabolical difficulty will bring to life the Hungary of my dreams; and since it will be for violin, why dont we call it Tzigane? Of course, Tzigane by Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who has been playing and dancing this music since her childhood in Moldova, does not sound like salon music . . .

This "collaborative exploration" of Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, D. 810 ("Death and the Maiden"), is experimental even by the standards of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. It offers the Schubert quartet itself, in an arrangement for string orchestra by Kopatchinskaja herself, that preserves the original quartet forces in some passages; between its movements come other works by Augustus Nörmiger, John Dowland, Carlo Gesualdo, and György Kurtág, along with a piece of Byzantine chant, all of them on the theme of death and often making specific musical reference to the content of the Schubert.

Soprano Anna Prohaska and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja are both well known for their taste for eclecticism, experimentation and adventure. As they are also are friends, it was only to be expected that one day they would devise and record a programme together, and here it is: Maria Mater Meretrix… What is the relationship between Hildegard von Bingen and Gustav Holst, Antonio Caldara and Lili Boulanger? The two musicians and their partners in Camerata Bern explore the image of woman through ten centuries of music: the figure of the Virgin Mary – among other works, the triptych Magnificat - Ave Maria - Stabat Mater (1967/68) by Frank Martin, an unclassifiable composer whom both artists venerate – but also Mary Magdalene, in pieces by Caldara and Kurtág. The Saint, the Mother, the Whore… The expression of two women musicians of today, a journey full of meaning and a sensory exploration featuring solos, duets, quartets and works for large orchestra.

Giovanni Antonini and his ensemble Il Giardino Armonico celebrate the composer who made them famous: Antonio Vivaldi. Their recordings of The Four Seasons and Cecilia Bartoli's famous first Vivaldi recital left an indelible mark on the discography of the Red-haired Priest! Their musical fireworks display continues with a programme of concertos that is bound to provoke strong reactions, since it is the result of a meeting with a musician who is equally adept at shifting boundaries, the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

George Antheil called himself a ‘Pianist-Futurist’. A lover of speed, cars and aeroplanes, the American composer settled in the Paris of the Années Folles, where he frequented Picasso and Stravinsky, and composed works such as Sonate sauvage and Jazz Sonata, which caused a scandal: during a concert in Budapest, he even brandished a Chicago gangster-style pistol to restore silence in the hall … He hero-worshipped Beethoven, whose pieces he played in the first part of his recitals before moving onto his own music. In 1933, he returned to the United States where he met John Cage and Morton Feldman. Patkop and the young Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen – whom The Times, following what the journalist described as ‘one of those concerts you remember for ever’, presented as the violinist’s ‘doppelgänger’! – pay tribute to the ‘Bad Boy of Music’.

Quasi Parlando is an important addition to ECM's documentation of the work of Tigran Mansurian, an often breathtaking account of highly original contemporary chamber orchestra music. Issued in the wake of his 75th birthday, the album presents four works for soloists and strings, and marks the ECM debut of the Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, winner of the 2013 Gramophone Awards 'Record of the Year'. It opens with the Armenian composer's fiercely-concentrated Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and String Orchestra, and proceeds to new music performed by its dedicatees: the lyrical Romance, dedicated to Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and the intensely expressive Quasi Parlando, dedicated to German cellist Anja Lechner. Both are world premiere recordings, as is the Violin Concerto No 2, subtitled Four Serious Songs, which concludes the programme. Throughout, the soloists deliver committed performances, as does the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under the direction of Candida Thompson.

This album celebrates a musical rapport that has lasted for twenty years and, above all, a true friendship: ‘We’re like two sisters, on stage and in life’, as Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Sol Gabetta like to say. In parallel with their dazzling solo careers, they have frequently got together for concerts in trio or double concerto formation (like the one written for them by Francisco Coll, recently released on ALPHA580). But they have conceived their new recording for a rather rare combination, the violin cello duo – with the aim of choosing pieces they found interesting either stylistically or for the way they use the instruments.

This album celebrates a musical rapport that has lasted for twenty years and, above all, a true friendship: ‘We’re like two sisters, on stage and in life’, as Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Sol Gabetta like to say. In parallel with their dazzling solo careers, they have frequently got together for concerts in trio or double concerto formation (like the one written for them by Francisco Coll, recently released on ALPHA580). But they have conceived their new recording for a rather rare combination, the violin- cello duo – with the aim of choosing pieces they found interesting either stylistically or for the way they use the instruments. The programme includes the Duo written by Zoltán Kodály in 1914, which was not premiered until 1924, two years after Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello, along with a few forays into the Baroque period (Leclair, Scarlatti, Bach) and, of course, works by twenty-first- century composers to whom the two soloists are very close: Jörg Widmann, Francisco Coll and Julien-François Zbinden are on the itinerary of this introspective journey into the generous world of two total artists.

This recording presents the double concerto for violin, cello and orchestra of the Spanish composer Francisco Coll, born in 1985. Les Plaisirs Illuminés, a title inspired by Dalí’s painting of the same name, is rooted in Spanish traditions, including flamenco, yet is resolutely modern: ‘Its music is very lively rhythmically, it dances and sings – but at the same time it is very abrupt, always in search of extremes’, says Patricia Kopatchinskaja. For this world premiere conducted by the composer, she is reunited with a longstanding partner who pursues an equally brilliant international career, the cellist Sol Gabetta.

The OPL and Gustavo Gimeno continue their acclaimed PENTATONE series of composer portraits with a monograph of a living composer, Francisco Coll. In Coll’s music, the past and present converge in a single space, by realising a contemporary sound world while creatively employing traditional forms and influences, be it a classical genre (Violin Concerto and the “grotesque symphony” Mural) or his musical roots (Four Iberian Miniatures). With pieces composed between 2005 and 2019, the album traces Coll’s spectacular musical development, from his studies under Thomas Adès in London to his present bloom. The lush, sensuous nature of his orchestral writing fully comes to life in these performances. Besides the strong relationship between Coll and conductor Gimeno, this new release also showcases the exceptional violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, for whom he has written several works, including his violin concerto, first recorded here.

Pierrot lunaire, premiered in Berlin in 1912, is a series of twenty-one short melodramas for voice and five instruments on German translations of poems by Albert Giraud. Here the composer first introduces Sprechgesang (speech-song), a technique that revolutionised declamation. Schoenberg wanted the piece to be ironic, at once tender and grotesque, in the manner of cabaret songs.

With a title like Time & Eternity and graphics featuring the disembodied head of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, you know you're in for an ambitious program. Kopatchinskaja's albums have been getting increasingly experimental as her career has developed, and this one is at no time boring, whatever you may think of the overall concept. Sample Crux, by Lubos Fiser, for violin, timpani, and bells, with the timpani pounding away as a kind of avatar of dread. This said the structure of the program is not quite as unconventional as it may at first appear to be.

Born in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1943 Faradzh Karaev is one of the leading composers of the post Soviet era. The chronology of his creative works resembles more the typical avant-garde cardiogram than a classical gradual growth. Neoclassics and serial music, pointillism and sonore, collages and modality, neoromanticism and mugam, postmodernism and jazz, European instrumental theatre and a theatre of folk instruments, conceptualism and electronic music…