Interview with Lisa Batiashvili: the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and Life's Path

March 15, 2024, 12:59 PM · In some ways, the Sibelius Violin Concerto - and Finland - was where concert life began for Georgian-born violinist Lisa Batiashvili.

Violinist Lisa Batiashvili. Photo by Sammy Hart, courtesy Deutsche Grammophon.

"Finland was an important country to me - it was the culture for my career and my musical life - because of the Sibelius competition," Batiashvili told me in an interview last month over Zoom. When she was 16, Batiashvili placed second in the 1995 Sibelius Competition in Helsinki, as the youngest competitor in its history. "It opened up a lot of opportunities for me, it was where the first kind of real concert life started for me."

"And it was also very much related to this concerto, so you can imagine, my story goes back to those years with this concerto, with all the fantastic Finnish conductors that I worked with on this concerto, each very different," Batiashvili said.

This week Batiashvili performs Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto again with a great Finnish conductor - she will tour the U.S. West Coast with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony. The concerts take place this weekend in San Francisco at Davies Symphony Hall, and then she and the orchestra will travel to southern California for concerts March 20 in Costa Mesa at the Segerstrom Center, March 21 in Palm Desert at McCallum Theatre and March 22 in Los Angeles at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Batiashvili has a long history with Salonen - she actually recorded her first Deutsche Grammophon album in 2011 with him - featuring Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1.

"Esa-Pekka is of course not only a fantastic conductor, he's a great composer, a great musical personality and such an incredible mind," Batiashvili said. "It's always so interesting to listen to him talk about music."

When it comes to the Sibelius concerto, "this is the only piece I’ve recorded twice" - on her debut album in 2007 with the Finnish Radio Orchestra and Sakari Oramo, together with the Lindberg concerto; and also in 2016 with David Barenboim and Staatskapelle Berlin, along with the Tchaikovsky concerto.

"When we go back to a piece that we've performed many times with many different orchestras and conductors, one might think that it would get a bit boring, or a bit difficult to actually like the piece and keep it fresh," Batiashvili said. "But the key is to have a vision and an idea about inner perfection. What would be a perfect violin concerto? For me it is not a technical perfection - it's more about how I want to express myself in the moment and be free. To be so sure, that I can be free to express what I want."

"I think if you work towards your own understanding of perfection, it will never get boring - because it's almost impossible to achieve this!" she said, laughing. "Of course with time, you evolve, you understand better how things function - then you want even something better. You want even more freedom, but also more of a feeling of making chamber music with the orchestra. When you are a young musician, you are more of a soloist, playing with an orchestra. But as more time goes by, we become part of the whole. For me personally, the great privilege of being a musician is creating something on stage with others. This is why Sibelius is a piece that keeps evolving and keeps developing my own spirit."

BELOW: Lisa Batiashvili performs an excerpt from the third movement of the Sibelius violin concerto, from a 2018 performance with the Berlin Philharmonic and Paavo Järvi.

For Batiashvili, the Sibelius concerto is all about story-telling. "It's a piece that tells all about the life of a of a human being," she said. "It has so much drama and passion. There's a lot of dance. There are so many aspects of life, but also lots of solitude. I think there is a lot about a lonely soul that is taking the path - and is taking the orchestra with it. For me, each time I play it is a new adventure. You start the piece and you really go into it - it's very easy to go deep into the music, with this concerto."

During this concert season, Batiashvili has been Artist-in-Residence for the Berlin Philharmonic, a post that has been deeply significant for her.

"Berlin has been one of my favorite cities for a long time," Batiashvili said. Her love for Berlin is connected to her childhood in Georgia, which in those days was part of the Soviet Union.

"I was four years old when I started to listen to music - my father brought home recordings," she said. "It was almost illegal - it was not really something people used to do in the Soviet Union. He brought LPs, and we had an LP player, even though we were one of the very few families who had this."

"So, I used to listen to the recordings of Berlin Philharmonic with (conductor Herbert von) Karajan," Batiashvili said, "and for me that was something so far away and so unreachable - so perfect."

"Anne-Sophie Mutter was so young at that time, 13 or 14 years old, and she did the Mozart recordings - that what I listened to most," she said. "But also, I listened to all sorts of symphonies." This fired up her imagination - and her love for Berlin, and Europe in general. "These recordings were all on the Deutsche Grammophon label - so it was these two things, the mix of Berlin Philharmonic and Deutsche Grammophon label. For me, the vision of life outside the Soviet Union was really connected to these two institutions - and to music. I was very much aware that the musical life - in Europe especially- was so colorful, with high quality, many different orchestras, and so many possibilities to learn and to further education. European art history and culture was something that was - through these recordings of the Berlin Philharmonic - very present in my head."

Batiashvili first played with the Berlin Philharmonic when she was 25 years old, "and a really wonderful friendship started, from the beginning." That musical relationship has evolved into more personal relationships as well, really getting to know the orchestra and its members. "I would love to stay (in Berlin) because here I have found something that feeds my soul as an artist."

Significantly for Batiashvili, the Berlin Phil will be playing a concert in Georgia - its annual Europakonzert on May 1, which it gives each year, in different cities of Europe. It marks the first time that a top European orchestra has performed in Georgia, which is now a candidate for European Union membership. Batiashvili will perform the Brahms Violin Concerto, with David Barenboim conducting.

"Ever since I started playing with the great orchestras, I've always thought that I would love to share this experience with a Georgian audience - because the Georgian audiences have never had the opportunity to listen to these fantastic orchestras," Batiashvili said. Up until now, the logistics have always been too challenging to overcome. But now, with the Berlin Phil, "this was the moment where suddenly everything has come together," she said. With Georgia poised to join the European Union, having the Europakonzert in Georgia "has huge significance," she said. "And of course, for me as a Georgian artist who has spent so much time in Germany, it also is a very, very emotional and personal kind of moment, to somehow bring these two cultures together."

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