Lisa Batiashvili

Violinist Lisa Batiashvili has developed a highly successful career both as a soloist appearing with the world's leading orchestras and as a chamber player performing in duos or larger groups. A major and critically lauded recording artist, her vast repertory encompasses works from J.S. Bach and Beethoven to Prokofiev and Shostakovich and contemporaries. Batiashvili has given the world premieres of several important works, including the Magnus Lindberg Violin Concerto, written specifically for her, which she recorded to great acclaim. Batiashvili has appeared with the major orchestras of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Berlin, Leipzig, Amsterdam, and Tokyo and with such artists as pianists Hélène Grimaud and Till Fellner, violinists Christian Tetzlaff and Isabelle Faust, cellist Adrian Brendel, and oboist François Leleux, who is also her husband. Batiashvili has recorded for EMI, DG, EuroArts, and Sony. Lisa (Elizabeth) Batiashvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1979. Her father was a violinist and her mother a pianist. Before age three Batiashvili was playing a miniature violin. She also studied piano in her childhood. From age eight, she studied music at a Tbilisi music school for gifted children. Amidst the dissolution of the Soviet Union, her family emigrated to Munich, Germany, when she was 11. Batiashvili studied music at the Hamburg Musikhochschule with Mark Lubotski and at the Munich Musikhochschule with Ana Chumachenco. At 16 Batiashvili captured second prize at the Helsinki-based Sibelius Competition. From 1999 to 2001 she was a BBC New Generation Artist, debuting at the 2000 BBC Proms. In 2001 Batiashvili appeared in the recorded premiere of the Olli Mustonen Concerto for 3 violins, with fellow violinists Jaakko Kuusisto and Pekka Kuusisto, on the Ondine label. Over the next few years her career blossomed with major concert dates across Europe and the U.S. In August 2006 she premiered the Lindberg Concerto at Avery Fisher Hall, with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, Louis Langrée conducting. Batiashvili signed a recording contract with Sony in 2007 and went on to record the Beethoven Violin Concerto for that label and a disc of works by Mozart and Britten. In 2008 Batiashvili gave the premiere in London of the Kancheli double concerto Broken Chant, for violin, oboe, and orchestra, with her husband François Leleux and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. After living in Munich for 15 years, Batiashvili, her husband, and two children moved to France. Her later recordings have included the 2011 Echoes of Time, a Deutsche Grammophon release that includes works by Shostakovich, Kancheli, Rachmaninov, and Pärt. She recorded an album of chamber music by Harrison Birtwistle for ECM in 2013, with a group that included cellist Adrian Brendel (son of Alfred), but her other recordings in the 2010s, favoring quality over quantity, have featured careful readings of major repertory items: she recorded the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, with the Staatskapelle Dresden (of which she was "Kapell-Virtuosin") in 2014, and early 2017 saw a Deutsche Grammophon release of the Sibelius and Tchaikovsky violin concertos with the old lion Daniel Barenboim at the helm of the Berlin Staatskapelle. ~ Robert Cummings, James Manheim