Tsotne Zedginidze

Born in 2009, Tsotne Zedginidze comes from a family of Georgian musicians. His ancestors included the important composer Niko Sulkhanishvili and the piano teacher Anastasia Abdushelishvili-Virsaladze, who trained Elisso Virsaladze and Dmitri Bashkirov, among others. Tsotne Zedginidze received his first piano lessons from his grandmother Nino Mamradze at the age of five. Just one year later, he was already playing sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven, pieces by Liszt and Prokofiev, and Bach’s inventions and symphonies. At the same time, he was already regularly attending opera performances and playing the works he heard on the piano. Tsotne Zedginidze also began composing at an early age and became involved with new music. At his first public piano recital in Tbilisi in June 2019, he performed his own compositions alongside works by Berg, Bach, Shostakovich, and Janáček, and at his first performance with the Georgian National Philharmonic Orchestra, he also presented pieces of his own alongside Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto. In 2021, he wrote his Violin Sonata for Lisa Batiashvili and performed it with her at the Tsinandali Festival. He has since performed with Batiashvili at the Vienna Konzerthaus, at the Audi Summer Concerts in Ingolstadt, and, in 2024, in the Berliner Philharmoniker chamber music series. He has also performed at the Verbier Festival, at Schloss Elmau, and at the Kissinger Sommer, as well as in The Hague and Brussels. Tsotne Zedginidze has attended master classes with Jörg Widmann. Daniel Barenboim marveled at him, saying: “Mozart is coming back to Europe from Georgia.” Sir Simon Rattle engaged him for a joint concert by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Bavarian State Youth Orchestra and performed Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto with him as the soloist in January 2024. Lisa Batiashvili simply calls him “a talent of the century.”

May 2024