Lisa Batiashvili

Lisa Batiashvili is the “artiste étoile” at this year’s Lucerne Summer Festival. Born in Tbilisi in 1979 to musical parents, she moved to Germany with her family in 1991 and continued her violin studies 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. Lisa Batiashvili regularly performs with the world’s finest orchestras, including the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics; the Staatskapelle Berlin; the New York Philharmonic; the London, Boston, and Chicago Symphony Orchestras; and the Cleveland and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestras. In the 2023-24 season, she was artist-in-residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker and toured with the orchestra under the direction of Daniel Barenboim and Kirill Petrenko. She has also given chamber concerts with the flutist Emmanuel Pahud, the clarinetist Jörg Widmann, the cellist Gautier Capuçon, the pianists Denis Kozhukhin and Jean-Yves Thibaudet and members of the Vienna Philharmonic. Lisa Batiashvili is additionally committed to 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. In 2021, she fulfilled her heart’s desire by establishing the Lisa Batiashvili Foundation to promote Georgian musical talent. She is currently performing in recitals with two of her current scholarship holders, Giorgi Gigashvili and Tsotne Zedginidze. A recipient of the Echo and Opus Klassik Awards, the Midem Classical Award, and the Choc de l’année for her CDs, she released her accounts of Chausson’s Poème and Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto in 2022. Lisa Batiashvili plays a Guarneri del Gesù from 1739.

Lucerne Festival debut on 21 August 2018 with the Tchaikovsky Concerto and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim.

March 2024