You have to have a gimmick to put out yet another recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, and Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili has two dandy ones: She plays the Beethoven without a conductor, leading the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen in a performance that, for all its rough-hewn muscle, is unified and full of rhetorical flair; and she includes an odd but fascinating curtain-raiser, a group of six orchestral miniatures by Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze. These pieces (written for string quartet and arranged by the violinist's father, Tamas Batiashvili) combine folk strains - dances, love songs - with a formal inventiveness that is striking. The performances muster plenty of rhythmic panache and lead nicely into a vigorous account of the Beethoven.
Lisa Batiashvili (Georgian: ლიზა ბათიაშვილი) (born Elisabeth Batiashvili, in 1979) is a Georgian violinist, the daughter of a violinist father and a pianist mother. Her father was her first teacher from age 4. She later studied at the Hamburg Musikhochschule.[1] In 1995, she was a prize winner in the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition.
In 2006, she was the soloist in the first performances in the United States (August, world premiere) and in Sweden (October, European premiere) of the violin concerto of Magnus Lindberg, which Lindberg wrote for Batiashvili.[11][12] She has recorded the Lindberg concert as part of her recording contract with Sony Classical, which she signed in 2007.[13] Batiashvili and her husband, the oboist François Leleux, commissioned from Giya Kancheli the double concerto Broken Chant, which they premiered in February 2008 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London.[14]
Batiashvili's native Georgia is represented with Giya Kancheli's haunting V & V, a small taste of a sound world which is markedly different from, yet somehow connected to, that of its massive northern neighbor. Georgian people are actually not at all related to Russians , explains Lisa Batiashvili. You have the mountains and the sea and great weather for eight months of the year ... Of course, I cannot avoid sounding Georgian when I play. I spent my childhood there, and when you are in Georgia, you feel something very intense. It's in my genes and in my veins, even if I've spent more than 20 years now in Europe. It is with this personal devotion and pride that Batiashvili champions the music of her compatriot.
