Patricia Kopatchinskaja: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music’s Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It’s the same spirit — stripped-down sets, an intimate setting — just a different space. Tom Huizenga | March 8, 2022 Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and pianist Joonas Ahonen, like most of us right now, are concerned about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kopatchinskaja hails from Moldova, which shares a border with Ukraine and declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Ahonen is from Finland, which borders Russia in the east and was once under the Russian Empire until the 1917 Revolution. “We are outraged,” the violinist says. And the music the two have chosen to play, in her Vienna apartment, is appropriate in both its bold surface features and deeper connections. The two movements from Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7 have never sounded more fiercely provocative. No dainty singing line in