Lisa Batiashvili’s New Release On Deutsche Grammophon

Lisa Batiashvili’s new album for Deutsche Grammophon Secret Love Letters is themed around complicated and tantalising love affiars and features music by Chausson, Debussy, Franck and Szymanowski.

Released this month it features the Georgian-born German violinist performing romantic repertoire accompanied by the young Georgian pianist Giorgi Gigashvili and the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by its Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. 

The centrepiece of the album is Karol Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto, the Polish composer’s meditation on the imagery of Noc majowa (“May Night”), a poem by Tadeusz Miciński. It was written during the First World War and premiered in Warsaw in November 1922. “It’s a piece full of love and pain deriving from the restrictions experienced by a man who was in love with another man at a time when this was outlawed both legally and morally”, Lisa explains. Paul Kochanski, for whom the work was written, gave its US premiere with The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1924 at the historic Academy of Music in Philadelphia, where this performance by Batiashvili’s was recorded almost a century later this year.

Ernest Chausson’s Poème for violin and orchestra, was composed in 1896 inspired by a novella by the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, who was infatuated with the famous mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot. Poème was inspired by and dedicated to one of the great artists of the day, the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe.

Franck’s Sonata in A major for violin and piano was presented by him to the Belgian virtuoso violinist Eugène-Auguste Ysaÿe and his bride Louise Bourdeau as a wedding gift, premiering in Brussels in December 1886. At the piano is Giorgi Gigashvili, recent recipient of a scholarship from the Lisa Batiashvili Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up by the violinist to support exceptional young artists living in Georgia.

Nézet-Séguin himself accompanies Batiashvili in Debussy’s Beau soir, originally setting the text of  the novelist and critic Paul Bourget in this arrangement by Jascha Heifetz for violin and piano.