Khatia Buniatishvili LABYRINTH

LABYRINTH

 

Khatia Buniatishvili / Paavo Järvi / Orchestre de Paris CHOPIN

Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili is a phenomenon, and kudos to Sony Classical for snagging her! This is Chopin of the old school, with massive interposition of the performer between music and listener. And it's glorious. The Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 35, is an absolutely original reading, with that black belt of classical pianism, a fresh rendition of the famous funeral march, with real involvement in the emotional content of the movement. This is a Chopin funeral march played after someone actually died, and the moment of chilly nihilism that serves as the finale is really a bit scary here. The big Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52, is hardly less stirring. Buniatishvili races forward at times, delays as if in torture at other times, and has the skills and the raw power to pull it all off. Are there problems? Sure. It's true that a 19th-century virtuoso recital would have freely mixed orchestral and solo music, but the live performance of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21, doesn't quite fit here, partly because the acoustic of the Salle Pleyel in Paris is nothing like that of the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin, where the other pieces were recorded. And a few of Buniatishvili's dynamic contrasts go beyond anything Chopin could have accomplished with his own piano or even intended. But these are the flaws that serve only to point up the considerable accomplishments elsewhere. This is the kind of Chopin playing that people used to line up to hear. (James Manheim)

Khatia Buniatishvili FRANZ LISZT

Because Khatia Buniatishvili always wanted her debut recording to be a portrait of Franz Liszt, it is fortuitous that this album was released in time for the 200th anniversary of the composer's birth. This CD/DVD combo introduces the Georgian pianist in a manner that seems half a fulfillment of a fantasy and half a kitschy marketing ploy for Sony, overdone in its packaging, photography, and booklet. But the window-dressing should take nothing away from Buniatishvili's playing, which is wholly convincing in its power, incisiveness, fluidity, and clarity. It is evident that she is committed to Liszt with passionate intensity, and her playing lacks nothing in the necessary expressive range, from the dreamy delicacy of the Liebesträum in A flat major to the towering grandeur of the Sonata in B minor, with every nuanced possibility in between. The program is quite accessible, with these famous pieces and others, such as the Mephisto Waltz No. 1, La lugubre gondola, and the Prelude & Fugue in A minor (after Bach). Buniatishvili clearly understands that Liszt's music was about a lot more than flashy runs and clangorous octaves, and that there is a subtle creative aspect of his work that influenced a century of Romantic music and is still being felt today. Having Buniatishvili as an interpreter is certainly good for the Liszt revival, and it, in turn, should be quite helpful for her career, despite the label's gilding of the lily. (Blair Sanderson)

Khatia Buniatishvili / Czech Philharmonic Orchestra / Paavo Järvi RACHMANINOFF Piano Concertos Nos. 2 & 3

A highlight of Khatia's recording career where she reunites with Paavo Järvi for her first orchestral recording in four years. The recording includes Rachmaninoff 2 & 3 - rarely combined on one CD and two blockbuster concertos of the late-romantic repertoire - especially the 2nd concerto was featured in many famous movies such as Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) or Clint Eastwoods' film Hereafter (2010). The 3rd concerto was prominently featured in Shine (1996) with David Helfgott. This album was recorded with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, at Rudolfinum, Dvorak Hall, Prague.

Khatia Buniatishvili MOTHERLAND

Khatia Buniatishvili has been described by The Independent as “the young Georgian firebrand”. At the age of only 26 years, this Tblisi-born pianist has already achieved an exceptional maturity of interpretation and a distinctive artistic approach that make her playing unmistakable. Khatia’s warm, sometimes sorrowful playing may reflect a close proximity to Georgian folk-music, which, she attests, has greatly influenced her musicality. Critics emphasize that her playing has an aura of elegant solitude and even melancholy, which she does not feel to be a negative attribute. “The piano is the blackest instrument,” she says, a “symbol of musical solitude… I have to be psychologically strong and forget the hall if I want to share it with the audience.” Khatia Buniatishvili speaks five languages and lives in Paris.

The CD is an intimate quest encompassing solo piano works from Bach to Pärt and from Brahms to Kancheli, in which the themes of longing for home, the merriment of a folk dance and the eternal cycle of growth and decay are apparent. Spanning a broad stylistic and historical range, the album celebrates the works that have accompanied Khatia Buniatschvili’s personal path in life, including pieces from her Georgian homeland. Motherland juxtaposes the happy lightness of a ‘Slavonic Dance’ by Dvorak and the melancholy of Grieg’s lyrical ‘Homesickness’, and contrasts the elegant gaiety of Mendelssohn’s ‘Song without Words’ (op. 67/2) with the graceful introspection of Liszt’s ‘Lullaby’. Classics of the Romantic piano repertoire such as Chopin’s Étude in C-sharp minor (op. 25/7) and Brahms ‘Intermezzo’ (op. 117/2) are embedded between Bach’s cantata ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ and Arvo Pärt’s musical dedication ‘For Alina’. 

Khatia Buniatishvili SCHUBERT

There is a certain femininity and sensitivity in Schubert’s works, as well as an ability to wait and endure. This femininity and heightened sensitivity are destined to die. Yet this suicide is to be found at such a profound depth, stifled, with no outward expression of the tragedy of loss, that it remains invisible and inaudible in the major mode, like a peaceful and carefree river which ows without any counter-movement, taking with it a white night dress that was once worn and has since been abandoned. 

In an age where everything seems accessible and diversity a given, the profound depth in shades and singularities, the existence of contrasts and contradictions in a human being seem strangely difficult to perceive. This is not a tragedy but rather a dilemma. A strong woman is difficult to accept and finds it difficult to accept herself because of the vulnerability that she reveals. Nevertheless, the strength of a woman is her complexity. While the ability to wait is considered to be a weakness of a romantic nature, it also means bearing pain; this enables her to give birth, create, remain constant to and protective of her children, faithful to her ideas, to her loves. 

In Schubert’s music, it is this femininity that sings, rising out from the greatest of vulnerability, love, and which is transformed into a greater strength, to act, create and exist. I dedicate this album to this part that exists in me and in other women and men, that I tried for a long time to let drift away. (Khatia Buniatishvili)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica HYMNS AND PRAYERS

A beautifully-recorded album from master violinist Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata, Baltica, spanning a wide range of music, all of it broached with conviction. Hungarian composer and pianist Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer from the Serbian province of Vojvodina has written eight hymns in commemoration of the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, an artist he has called a homo moralis whose remarkable visions cast a small but significant light on the tragic world of the previous century. Georgian composer Giya Kancheli contributes a silent prayer for two of his most important musical associates: the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and the violinist Gidon Kremer. The contemplative intensity of the hymns and the ascetic tranquillity of the prayer are offset by César Franck‘s Piano Quintet in F minor like a premonition of Beethoven’s Appassionata, whose second movement, marked Lento, molto sentimento, in turn takes up the mood of the other two works. This programmatic combination underlines an intrinsic principle Paul Klee developed in his theory of harmony in the visual arts: any compositional harmony will gain character through dissonances, with the balance being restored by counterweights. (ECM Records)

Gidon Kremer EDITION LOCKENHAUS

Five-CD limited-edition box set, issued in time for the 30th anniversary of the Austrian chamber-music festival. “Edition Lockenhaus” returns long out-of-print titles to the catalogue, with some of the finest musicians of the New Series, including Gidon Kremer, Kim Kashkashian, Heinz Holliger, Thomas Zehetmair, Thomas Demenga, Robert Levin, Eduard Brunner and many more. Gidon Kremer: “The artistic atmosphere in Lockenhaus soon has everybody speaking on the same wavelength.” The set opens with previously unreleased recordings – from 2001 and 2008 – with Sir Simon Rattle and Roman Kofman conducting Kremerata Baltica in revelatory performances of Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” and Olivier Messiaen’s “Trois petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine”: the committed interpretations convey the spirit of Lockenhaus. Discs two through five focus on music of César Franck, André Caplet, Francis Poulenc, Leos Janácek, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Erwin Schulhoff. Original liner notes, an interview with Kremer, and new texts complete a very special edition. (ECM Records)

Khatia Buniatishvili KALEIDOSCOPE

Khatia Buniatishvili's new recording Kaleidoscope, a unique combination of masterful and challenging pieces, shows her true virtuosic playing and features the well-loved Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky, Ravel's La Valse and Stravinsky's Petruschka.

Given that these pieces all have an orchestral version, the pianist must bring out this larger palette of colours on a single instrument. Khatia does just that, painting her own picture of the pieces, how they are interwoven and the special characters she wants to emphasize.

There is a strong sense of character about the programme - it is music to be seen as well as heard, and it takes in other art forms as well: dance, puppetry and painting. The movement and colours of these other art forms are encapsulated in Khatia’s playing and the album’s title, Kaleidoscope. (Presto Classical)

Gidon Kremer / Giedré Dirvanauskaité / Khatia Buniatishvili PETER I. TCHAIKOVSKY - VICTOR KISSINE Piano Trios

It's a paradoxical situation: Mozart and Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms all honoured the genre of the piano trio by writing works which should not rightly be called "piano trios". Rather than accepting the supremacy of the keyboard over the string instruments explicit in the very term 'piano trio', the composers instead wanted a three-way conversation among equals in which the highly contrasting instrumental timbres coalesced at a higher level. And they achieved that by liberating the cello from its ancient function as a continuo instrument and giving the violin the brilliance that had earned it pride of place among solo instruments ever since the 18th century, even in the concerto.
Another member of this company of great composers who granted instrumental parity to the trio with piano, violin and cello was Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in his only piece of chamber music for this combination of instruments: the Trio in A minor, op. 50. This scrupulous composer, who was never convinced of his compositional prowess despite having already achieved huge acclaim with quite different musical difficulties (symphonies, piano concertos, operas and ballets), hesitated for a long time before venturing onto this terrain. To the hyper-sensitive Tchaikovsky, the combination of piano and string instruments was, as he once put it in a letter to his lifelong benefactress Nadezhda von Meck, something unnatural, for each instrument had to sacrifice its distinctive charm.
Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky convincingly surmounted this compositional problem. More than that, in his op. 50 he found a different way to resolve the paradox that composers from Mozart to Brahms had ferreted out and overcome – namely, he gave his work an almost orchestral garb. The mastery he had gained in the symphony served him in good stead in his chamber music, where the orchestral richness of the piano is offset by the wealth of colours and dynamic extremes of the string instruments. To be sure, this sort of timbral emancipation comes off especially well when played by musicians of the stature of Gidon Kremer (violin), Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė (cello) and Khatia Buniatishvili (piano), who impressively employ all the exuberance and verve of their respective instruments while staying finely attuned to their fellow performers. Here they do this in a work that bursts the boundaries of its form, with the wistful first movement augmented by a huge set of variations split into two large sections.
Such liberating and yet poised ensemble playing also redounds to the benefit of Zerkalo (Mirror), a trio composed by Victor Kissine in 2009 for the same combination of instruments. Kissine hails from St Petersburg and first came to notice with a scandalous operatic setting of Peter Weiss's play Marat-Sade before acquiring a reputation for chamber music. His trio, interpreted with consummate mastery by Kremer and his colleagues Dirvanauskaitė and Buniatishvili, is a sensitively balanced, almost intimate, yet technically demanding amalgam of the instruments' iridescent timbres – an amalgam which, however, can soar to dynamic escalations on a gigantic scale and is very close to the emotional universe of that Russian man of sorrows, Tchaikovsky. Kissine, a longstanding friend of Gidon Kremer, was inspired by two lines from Anna Akhmatova's "Poem without a Hero", though the resultant piece of music does not depend on external programmes. It turned into one of his most tight-knit and timbrally resplendent creations, pressing forward into barely perceptible acoustical realms that demand precisely the quality these three musicians have in common: telepathic empathy.