This is a typically quirky project from Patricia Kopatchinskaja: two dozen duets for violinist and another player (or speaker), spanning 1,000 years. It’s inspired by her 10-year-old daughter and the emphasis is on music as play. Biber’s Sonata Representativa, for example, finds Kopatchinskaja sliding around the strings to sound like a hen, a cat and a frog. Eleventh-century music from the Winchester Troper, played anachronistically but beautifully as a duet for violin and viol, rubs up against Overclockers, five 2013 pieces by electronic artist Jorge Sanchez-Chiong; Machaut and Gibbons, Martinu and Milhaud jostle amiably with Cage and brand new work. Kopatchinskaja talks us through everything in a programme book, punctuated by conversations with her sanguine daughter (one of whose stories is set by Heinz Holliger). A chunk of serious Vivier holds up the flow, but this disc is meant to be fun, and it almost entirely is.
