Lisa Batiashvili

Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili was born in 1979 in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, the child of a violinist and a pianist, and began playing the violin at the age of four. In 1991 the family moved to Germany, where Batiashvili studied with Mark Lubotsky in Hamburg and Ana Chumachenco in Munich. In 1995, at the age of sixteen, she became the youngest participant in the competition's history to win 2nd place at the "Jean Sibelius" competition in Helsinki and put an internationally acclaimed exclamation mark on the competition. Fortunately, with this success behind her, she did not rush into a concert career, but allowed her talent to mature in peace, accepting selected engagements as a soloist while continuing her studies. Her career developed steadily, further prizes and awards were not long in coming and in 2001 her first CD recording was released. For a long time now, she has been performing regularly with the major American and European orchestras.

The violinist is the exclusive artist of Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, for whom she has not only recorded great violin concertos by Tchaikovsky (with Daniel Barenboim), Johannes Brahms (with Christian Thielemann), Prokofiev (with Yannick Nézet-Séguin) and Dimitri Shostakovich (with Esa-Pekka Salonen), but has also made excursions into film, dance and folk music on the album City Lights. Her latest recording, featuring the young Georgian pianist Giorgi Gigashvili and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, includes César Franck's Violin Sonata and Karol Szymanowski's First Violin Concerto.

Batiashvili's activities extend far beyond performances as a soloist or in chamber music concerts. For example, she has been artistic director of the Audi Sommerkonzerte in Ingolstadt since 2019. One of her special concerns is the promotion of young Georgian musicians within the framework of the Lisa Batiashvili Foundation, which she established in 2021. The foundation awards scholarships, provides instruments, arranges contacts and offers a wide range of advice. Since Russia's attack on Ukraine, she has also been working specifically for Ukrainian musicians, collecting donations and organising benefit concerts. Lisa Batiashvili personally has also long taken a clear stand against Vladimir Putin's policies.

Batiashvili lives in Munich and is married to the oboist François Leleux, with whom she also gives joint concerts. She plays a violin by Giuseppe del Gesù, the last and most famous scion of the violin-making family. The instrument, dating from 1739, is on loan from a private German collector.

As of August 2022