Lisa Batiashvili

“… the concerto does make a fine showcase for Batiashvili’s fearless playing, which is so tonally rich and technically immaculate.”

The Guardian

Batiashvili’s unexpected magic came in another short Kancheli piece, V&V, ethereally building on the extraordinary recorded voice of Georgian popular singer Hamlet Gonashvili.

David Nice - The Arts Desk

"... 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