Performance reviews, critical acclaim, and features
Press"... the Georgian-born Lisa Batiashvili gave a muscular yet poetic account of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto (1903-4, revised 1905) (Prom 2), an ideal pairing with Elgar’s Symphony No 1, written at the same period: both questing works full of angst and melancholy."
Fiona Maddocks - The Guardian
Lisa Batiashvili, die ein Instrument von Guarneri spielt, gestaltete die Einleitung ungemein seelenvoll, und die technischen Schwierigkeit des folgenden Satzes inklusive der Kadenz mit beängstigender Präzision. Wie sie den Bogen führte, mit unglaublichen klanglichen Nuancen phrasierte, hatte Klasse.
Bernhard Hartmann, General-Anzeiger
Take the opener, Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No.2. This piece can so easily be milked for its adrenaline-fuelled thrills. What we got here, however, was a surprisingly delicate performance, memorable above all for the icy whisperings of the middle movement. That had a lot to do with the superb soloist, Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, who adapted her tone to the music’s every whim.
Hannah Nepil, Financial Times
It is a tribute to Barenboim, and particularly to the musicianship of Lisa Batiashvili, that the excellence of her performance of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto was far from overshadowed by the Elgar that followed. Batiashvili’s playing had all the mix of gutsy grandeur and soaring lines the piece demands, with the details never blurred even in the tearaway finale, while the interplay between soloist and orchestra was of a very special order.
Martin Kettle, The Guardian
She’s a dreamy-sounding, inward soloist at the start, shaping the melodies with care yet propelling them forward – this mammoth work has rarely seemed so concise.
Erica Jeal, The Guardian
A superlative performance by the young Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili. There was no vanity in her playing, just an elegantly expressive virtuosity which went to the heart of this work, and her sound was ideally focused for the difficult acoustic. Her encore made a welcome break from the usual Bach/Kreisler routine: a Georgian song-and-dance by Sulkhan Tsintsadze, charmingly arranged for violin and orchestra by her father Tamas Batiashvili.
The Independent
“Batiashvili received a thunderous ovation, one of the longest and most enthusiastic accorded a downtown soloist in recent seasons.”
The Classical Review
This performance is lively and warm, partly thanks to Batiashvili [the concerto's electrifying soloist on this CD], who sets the dominant tone in her darkly sensuous opening line . . . throughout Batiashvili remains herself: less showy than some but deeply responsive to the music's inner workings and its colours. The range of hues summoned within her long phrasings is wondrously wide, each one delicately applied. The slow movement, the concerto's singing heart, is tender without being sentimental... Here is the sort of thoughtful reading that makes you fall in love with the concerto all over again.
The Times, 01/2013
Die Geigerin spielt ihren Part mit einem schlanken Ton, dessen Schönheit einer starken sinnlichen Komponente nicht entbehrt...
Bonner Generalanzeiger
The soloist was Lisa Batiashvili, outstanding even among the very many fine violinists of her generation.
The Times, 08/2011
This cadenza — a sudden freeing of the individual voice from its dark orchestral environment — was, in the hands of Batiashvili, a searing portrait of the creative soul inwardly screaming in anguish. … Batiashvili compressed the D-S-C-H motif tightly within both the cadenza and a Scherzo that seemed both to thumb the nose to authority, and to turn in on itself in grotesque self-mockery.
The sheer stamina, intensity of focus and perfectionism of pitch and voicing in Batiashvili’s performance was remarkable. And her encore — Shostakovich’s droll little Dance of the Dolls — was a perfectly judged release of tension