Liszt Batsashvili

"The Georgian-born pianist leaves nothing to be desired with the generous warmth of her interpretations," Gramophone music magazine wrote of Mariam Batsashvili's readings of works by Chopin and Liszt. The Romantic Piano Masters recording is also all about Franz Liszt and his contemporaries.

Mariam Batsashvili presents a collection of singles for piano featuring the Liszt-arranged "Ständchen, Serenade". The offering heralds Batsashvili's upcoming Romantic Piano Masters, primarily devoted to evocative, technically formidable piano transcriptions of opera, song and organ music.

On her first Warner Classics album pianist Mariam Batsashvili combines solo works by Franz Liszt – a figure of special significance for her – and his contemporary Frédéric Chopin. She left her native Georgia to study at the Franz Liszt Conservatory in Weimar and gained international recognition in 2014 when she won the 10th Franz Liszt Piano Competition. Chopin was just a year older than Liszt and the two became good friends in Paris. The two pianist-composers are, as Batsashvili explains, “very, very different in the way they express themselves, but I can hear in their music that they respected each other greatly.”

"The Georgian-born pianist leaves nothing to be desired with the generous warmth of her interpretations," wrote the music magazine Gramophone about Mariam Batsashvili's reading of works by Chopin and Liszt. The recording of Romantic Piano Masters also revolves entirely around Franz Liszt and his contemporaries.

Frédéric Chopin was the most famous composer of Polish origin in the history of Western concert music. He was a progressive who revolutionized the harmonic content, the texture, and the emotional quality of the small piano piece, turning light dance forms, nocturnes, and study genres into profound works that were both daring and deeply inward. Born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin to a French father and a Polish mother, probably on March 1, 1810, he was a native of Zelazowa Wola village west of Warsaw. In these rustic surroundings, he was exposed to both the classics of keyboard music (including, significantly, those of Bach), by teachers who immediately recognized him as a prodigy, and to Polish folk music, which would be reflected in a pioneering musical nationalism. He quickly outstripped the talents of most of Warsaw's top piano and composition teachers, and when he graduated from the Main School of Music in 1829, professor Józef Elsner pronounced him a genius.