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The Georgian violinist, Lisa (Elisabeth) Batiashvili (Georgian: ლიზა ბათიაშვილი), was born to a musical family. Her father was a violinist and her mother was a pianist. Before age 3 she was playing a miniature violin. She began learning violin with her father from age 4. She also studied piano in her childhood. From age 8, she studied music at a Tbilisi Music School for gifted children. Amidst the dissolution of the Soviet Union, her family left Georgia in 1991 and emigrated to Munich, Germany, when she was 11 11 years old. She later studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. Mark Lubotsky, her teacher in Hamburg, had been a student of David Oistrakh, for whom Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his violin concertos. Later, she also studied with Ana Chumachenco. In 1995, she captured second prize and gained international recognition at age 16 as the youngest-ever competitor in the Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in Helsinki.
Lisa Batiashvili was one of the first of the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists, from 1999 to 2001. She has collaborated in chamber music and concerto performances with cellist Alban Gerhardt and pianist Steven Osborne, both BBC New Generation Artists exactly contemporary with Batiashvili. She has also worked with a later BBC New Generation Artist, Ashley Wass, in recital. She made her BBC Proms debut in 2000. Over the next few years her career blossomed with major concert dates across Europe and the USA.
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. Praised by audiences and fellow musicians for her virtuosity and “profound sensitivity” (Financial Times), she has developed long-standing relationships with some of the world’s leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Staatskapelle Berlin, Berliner Philharmoniker, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and London Symphony Orchestra. She became artist-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for the 2014-2015 season, and with the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome) for the 2017-2018 season. In parallel, she has an artist residency with the NDR Sinfonieorchester Hamburg. She has appeared with such artists as pianists Hélène Grimaud, Till Fellner and Igor Levit, violinists Christian Tetzlaff and Isabelle Faust, cellists Adrian Brendel, Danjulo Ishizaka and Truls Mørk, and oboist François Leleux, who is also her husband.
A major and critically lauded recording artist, Lisa Batiashvili's vast repertoire encompasses works from J.S. Bach and L.v. Beethoven to Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich and contemporaries. She has given the world premieres of several important works. In 2001, she appeared in the recorded premiere of the Olli Mustonen's Concerto for 3 violins, with fellow violinists Jaakko Kuusisto and Pekka Kuusisto, on the Ondine label. Magnus Lindberg dedicated a violin concerto to her, which she gave its world premiere at Avery Fisher Hall, New York, on August 22, 2006, with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, Louis Langrée conducting and European premiere in Sweden in October. Batiashvili and oboist François Leleux, commissioned from Giya Kancheli the double concerto for violin, oboe, and orchestra, Broken Chant, which they premiered in February 2008 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. She also commissioned a solo violin encore from her compatriot Igor Loboda for solo violin, "Requiem for Ukraine".
Last season (2016-2017) Lisa Batiashvili was Artist-in-Residence with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra as well as Portrait Artist of the Bamberger Symphoniker. She had first-time collaborations with Gustavo Dudamel and Michael Tilson Thomas, as well performances with Christian Thielemann, Andrés Orozco-Estrada and Sir Simon Rattle all of whom she collaborates with regularly.
In the 2017-2018 season Lisa Batiashvili will perform the UK premiere of Anders Hillborg’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Sakari Oramo); the concerto was written for and premiered by her in 2016-2017 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and Sakari Oramo. As part of her residency with Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, she will perform concertos by Tchaikovsky (Antonio Pappano), and Prokofiev (Manfred Honeck), as well as J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe (François Leleux). Later in the season, she will debut with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, and tour Europe with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (Vladimir Jurowski and Lorenzo Viotti), the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (Antonio Pappano), and Dresden Staatskapelle (Alan Gilbert). Other performance highlights include the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla), Münchner Philharmoniker (Alan Gilbert), and Sydney Symphony Orchestra (Dima Slobodeniouk).
Batiashvili has recorded for EMI, DG, EuroArts, and Sony. Batiashvili signed a recording contract with Sony in 2007 and went on to record L.v. Beethoven's Violin Concerto for that label and a disc of works by W.A. Mozart and Benjamin Britten. Her commercial recordings include Magnus Lindberg's Violin Concerto No. 1 as part of her recording contract with Sony. She has also recorded the L.v. Beethoven and Sibelius concertos for Sony. Earlier recordings include Dmitri Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No.1 with Bayerischer Rundfunk Symphonieorchester (Esa-Pekka Salonen). She currently records exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon. Her later recorhave included the 2011 "Echoes of Time", a DGG release that includes works by D. Shostakovich, Kancheli, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Arvo 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 Brendel), but her other recordings in the 2010's, favoring quality over quantity, have featured careful readings of major repertoire items: she recorded the Johannes Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, with the Dresden Staatskapelle (of which she was "Kapell-Virtuosin") conducted by Christian Thielemann, in 2014. Early 2017 saw a DGG release of the Sibelius and Tchaikovsky violin concertos with the old lion Daniel Barenboim at the helm of the Staatskapelle Berlin, an album which received international critical acclaim. In 2016, EuroArts released a DVD of her live Waldbühner performance of Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto 1 with Berliner Philharmoniker (Yannick Nézet-Séguin).
Lisa Batiashvili has been awarded two ECHO Klassik awards, the MIDEM Classical Award, the Choc de l’année, the Accademia Musicale Chigiana International Prize, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival’s Leonard Bernstein Award and the Beethoven-Ring. She is Musical America’s 2015 Instrumentalist of the Year. She plays a 1739 Guarneri del Gesu violin (Cozio 61377) lent to her from the private collection of an anonymous German collector. She is married to French oboist François Leleux. They have resided in both Munich and France with their two children. |
