Lisa Batiashvili
violin
Vita
Lisa Batiashvili was born in 1979 in Tbilisi as the daughter of professional musicians and moved with her family to Germany in 1991, continuing her violin training with Mark Lubotsky in Hamburg and with Ana Chumachenco in Munich. In 1995, she won second prize at the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki. She received the Leonard Bernstein Award at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in 2003 and the Beethoven Ring in Bonn in 2006. Batiashvili performs with the world’s leading orchestras, including the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the New York Philharmonic, the London, Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. She served as artist-in-residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker in the 2023-24 season and, in 2024-25, with the Orchestre de Paris; Lucerne Festival named her “artiste étoile” in the summer of 2024. Batiashvili also focuses on contemporary music. She has premiered violin concertos by Magnus Lindberg and Anders Hillborg; Giya Kancheli and Thierry Escaich have composed double concertos for her and her husband, the oboist François Leleux. She regularly performs chamber music; in the summer of 2025, she partnered with cellist Gautier Capuçon and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. In 2021, she fulfilled a long-held dream and established the Lisa Batiashvili Foundation to support talented musicians in Georgia. She is currently performing recitals with two of her current scholarship students, Giorgi Gigashvili and Tsotne Zedginidze. She has received the Echo Award, the Opus Klassik, the Midem Classical Award, and the Choc de l’année for her recordings. Her most recent release, from 2022, includes accounts of Chausson’s Poème and Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto. In July 2025, she received the Kaiser Otto Prize from the City of Magdeburg for her commitment against war and anti-Semitism. Lisa Batiashvili, who holds an honorary doctorate from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, plays on a 1739 Guarneri del Gesù.
Lucerne Festival debut on 21 August 2018 with the Tchaikovsky Concerto and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim.
April 2025
Magazine
