Lisa Batiashvili

Who is Lisa Batiashvili?

Lisa Batiashvili is a Georgian violinist, the daughter of a violinist father and a pianist mother. Her father was her first teacher from age 4. She later studied at the Hamburg Musikhochschule. In 1995, she was a prize winner in the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition.

She 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 has also been a soloist at the BBC Proms in 2000 and 2002.

In 2006, she was the soloist in the first performances in the United States and in Sweden of the violin concerto of Magnus Lindberg, which Lindberg wrote for Batiashvili. She has recorded the Lindberg concert as part of her recording contract with Sony Classical, which she signed in 2007. Batiashvili and her husband, oboist François Leleux, commissioned from Giya Kancheli the double concerto Broken Chant, which they premiered in February 2008 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London.