Mild-mannered virtuoso with a truly thunderous talent
Mariam Batsashvili Wigmore Hall, London W1 ★★★★ ★
At the age of only 27, Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili is already a seasoned habituée of the international concert circuit. She won the Liszt Piano Competition in Utrecht in 2014, she spent three years as a BBC New Generation Artist, and in recent years has performed in more than 30 countries. With concert life at a standstill, she’s been giving concerts from her living room, in which she first introduces the pieces in a tone of almost angelic sweetness, before going on to make the furniture rattle with some thunderous virtuosity by Franz Liszt.
That startling contrast was evident at Tuesday night’s recital, which had its fair share of thunderous moments, but also many moments of tiny, exquisite gentleness. Batsashvili
The sound was so bodiless it seemed as if the piano’s strings were being stroked with feathers
shrewdly programmed the evening to show off the huge range of tone she can command, beginning with the noble, restrained, somewhat ecclesiastical sound-world of César Franck’s Prelude, Fugue and Variation. Grandeur in softness was the keynote here, with never a hard sound to be heard even at climactic moments, as if the spirit of the organ had entered into the piano.
The contrast between that and Ravel’s Sonatine could hardly have been greater. Here, Batsashvili conjured a sound of fluttering yearning, so bodiless it seemed as if the piano’s strings were being stroked with feathers. But she didn’t sentimentalise the piece. The antique-sounding Menuet was taken at quite a brisk pace, rather than being drowned in slow nostalgia as it is in many performances, and the final movement surged impatiently on to its final triumphant chord. Batsashvili flung this off with huge force, but a force made of brilliance rather than weight.
Then she moved into the world of romantic bravura, with a fantasy on operatic melodies from Bellini’s La Sonnambula by Sigismund Thalberg, the great rival to Liszt for the title of World’s Greatest Composer-pianist in mid-19th century Europe. It takes a flawless technique to catch Thalberg’s way of making it seem as if the pianist has three hands – melody in the centre, and swirls of decoration on either side, with an endless trill floating over the top – and Batsashvili certainly has one.
As if to show us why Liszt eventually won that Battle of the Pianists, Batsashvili ended with his Paraphrase on a Waltz from Gounod’s Faust. Here the religious kitsch of Gretchen’s ascent into heaven sat side-by-side with the kind of swaggering romanticism that put the elegant flourishes of Thalberg in the shade.
So, Batsashvili can clearly do it all, brilliantly. If I wasn’t completely bowled over, it was because she’s so good at fleetness and grandeur and magic that she sometimes misses the emotional aspect of things, which was a problem in Schumann’s Fantasy Pieces, a set of “character” numbers with suggestive titles.
“Confused Dreams” sped by with miraculous lightness, but that was all; “Grilling” is marked by the composer “With Humour”, but here it sounded merely brisk. Still, with a talent of such awesome dimensions, Batsashvili has plenty of room to grow.
Hear this concert on BBC Sounds for 30 days, and at wigmore-hall.org.uk