COVID-lockdowns affect everybody and everything in different ways and they are catastrophic for the arts and artists. 
 
In the first lockdown I first was stunned and then got depressed. I manoeuvred myself out of this by first playing a few recitals for birds and passers-by in the nearby wood. Then in summer I organised some solo recitals in Swiss churches, earning over 20,000 Swiss Francs for musicians in need and at the same time extending my solo repertoire. After that I could play some live concerts but on a greatly reduced scale. In the last 25 years I never had as much free time. I invested it by being more with my family, by reading Tolstoi and about Napoleon and finally by regularly sitting down at the piano and again taking up the favourite pastime of my youth – composing.

I was also lucky to be asked to participate in or to direct several video concerts in Boswil, Gstaad, Salzburg, Bern and Stuttgart amongst others.

This is somewhat of a paradox because my musical mission up to now was to get out of the constraints which have been imposed on today’s musical performance by the perfectionistic standards of the recording industry as predicted by Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. I want really to get back to the performing tradition of the 19th century and earlier, where novelty, improvisation and risk taking were a matter of course and measure of quality.

With recorded music and online events, you lose the thrilling community experience of a concert and the give-and-take between artist and public, which includes dialogue, surprise, provocation, as well as applause and protest. Therefore, we began to try to make a virtue out of necessity, namely, to replace what is lost from the live performance by the specific visual and artistic possibilities of filmmaking. In fact, we did such projects even before COVID, an example being our filmed version of Kurt Schwitters Dadaistic Ursonate. And now our recent tour lost to COVID is replaced by the new film about Death and the Maiden which we produced together with the Camerata Bern and the team of filmmaker Quinn Reimann.

Filmed in the spectacular 1897 Riding Hall (Reithalle) in Bern – a place out of time, limits and rules, where the noise and lights of the many nearby passing trains remind us of transience and inevitability – we have transformed concert material into a form appropriate for streaming. The result is a real film which besides sound uses all the means of space, movement, imagination and imagery to replace what’s lost from a live performance.

Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet was inspired by his earlier eponymous song on a poem of Matthias Claudius, which itself was modelled on the simple old verses accompanying the many medieval representations of the dance of death that appeared after the plague. The film explores musical and contemporary contrasts from Gesualdo to Kurtág, or from COVID to ZOOM to show many the facets from the terrifying to the comforting …
 
And are we not dancing already?

Maybe the COVID-epidemic not only accelerates the molecular biology of mRNA vaccines, but it also facilitates other forms of concert and music films, a genre which has often been static up to now.

Nevertheless, I am craving for and looking forward to live concerts. The mission of reintroducing risk, surprise and novelty into our sclerotic concert routine is by far not finished.

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja joins Camerata Bern to present an adaptation of the Grammy award-winning programme ‘Death and the Maiden’ in a unique poetic concert-movie experience on Virtual Circle on 27 and 31 March. Tickets £10/$10/€10 showing in multiple timezones. Visit emusiclive.com/Camerata_Bern to find out more.