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Winning a major competition can obviously catapult a young musician into an international solo career. Sometimes just being a runner-up can accomplish the same thing. That was the case with Lisa Batiashvili, who took second place at the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in Helsinki in 1995.
“It was a very important and precious moment,” said the Georgian-born German violinist in an email interview. “It was when I started my life as a soloist and met wonderful musicians in Finland, which led to other encounters and gave me all the possibilities to study and at the same time, enlarge my musical circle.”
Now 44, Batiashvili ranks among the world’s most respected soloists on her instrument, performing regularly with top orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra and New York Philharmonic. She joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a pair of concerts in June with guest conductor James Gaffigan and returns Oct. 22 for a Symphony Center Presents Chamber Music concert.
Her Chicago recital is part of an eight-city American tour with two equally stellar artists, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and cellist Gautier Capuçon. Their cross-country trek begins Oct. 10 in Santa Barbara, California, and ends Oct. 24 with an appearance in New York’s Carnegie Hall. The tour, the trio’s third such venture, was supposed to occur in 2020 but had to be postponed because of the COVID-19 shutdown.
Many star soloists stick to orchestral appearances and duo recitals and don’t take much time for chamber music, but it is clearly important to Batiashvili. “I was raised with chamber music around me, which was quite unusual in the times of the Soviet Union, actually,” she said. Her father, violinist and arranger Tamás Batiashvili, has been a member for more than 50 years of a string quartet. It was the only chamber-music ensemble in Georgia that Soviet authorities allowed to travel abroad. “I used to listen to most of their rehearsals which took place in our apartment,” she said. “So I learned to love chamber music and still think the friendships we build with our colleagues though chamber music is crucial.”
“The friendships we build with our colleagues though chamber music are crucial.” — Lisa Batiashvili
Given that her father was a violinist and her mother a pianist, it was almost fated that Batiashvili would become a musician. “At 2 years old, I told my father I wanted to play the violin, just like him,” she said. “Very early on, the instrument started to structure my day, and I practiced with joy, with my father as my very first teacher.”
She and her family left Georgia in 1991 when she was 12, settling in Germany, where she later studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. At age 16, she became the youngest-ever entrant in the Sibelius competition, and four years later, she was chosen as one of the first BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists, a program that has proven to be an important incubator of classical talent.
Batiashvili has gone on to win many honors, including being named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year in 2015. “It meant a lot of course,” she said. “This is a very important award, and I have always felt extremely honored and blessed to perform regularly in the U.S. The support from the U.S. audience has always been very special and extremely motivating.”
Batiashvili typically comes to the United States twice a year, mostly to perform with orchestras. She has built relationships with several major American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, with which she has performed more than 60 concerts over 18 years.
In 2010, she became an exclusive recording artist for Deutsche Grammophon, with her most recent recording, “Secret Love Letters,” released in August 2022. It focuses on what the DG’s website describes as the “intimate, unspoken messages that can be expressed through music,” with works by Chausson, Debussy, Franck and Szymanowski. The disc marks her first recording with an American orchestra, in this case conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Even though Batiashvili resides in Munich, her Georgian heritage remains very important to her. In 2021, she established a foundation committed to helping up-and-coming musicians in her native country in financial and other ways. “The new generation has an incredible variety of talent and a great importance for our future in classical music,” she said. “To make these artists as known and visible as possible through culture and music is one of the greatest strengths for us Georgians and helps our small country.”
