Exile

The works in this program are largely by composers who were forced to flee their homelands. Ivan Wyschniewski fled to Paris in 1920, where he wrote for the quarter-tone piano at a time when even the slightest dissonance was regarded as a political provocation in Russia. Andrzej Panufnik left his native Poland in 1954. Alfred Schnittke settled in Hamburg in 1990, eight years before his death, after having spent most of his life in the Soviet Union. Although Schubert never moved away from Vienna, the pain and loneliness of his inner exile are palpable in his music. Finally, the Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe emigrated because of the First World War and wrote the melancholic musical poem "Exile!" here performed in the United States in 1917. Is exile nothing more than pain and isolation, or also a source of inspiration that expresses through music what words cannot say, and serves as a final refuge? “Let’s hear what they have to say,” suggests Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who herself is ‘forever uprooted.’ She is accompanied by cellist Thomas Kaufmann and her friends from the Camerata Bern.