EXPANDING THE LIMITS

AUDI AG

The vintage cars have been wheeled out of the Audi museum (a glass and metal drum of a building on the outskirts of the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt), giving way to a grand piano. Parked in the centre of the showroom fioor, it is surrounded on all sides by an audience who have come to hear Lisa Batiashvili, Gautier Capuçon and Jean-Yves €ibaudet play piano trios while a setting, but.scorching, July sun streams in.

Batiashvili is the new artistic director of Audi Summer Concerts, a series that the motor vehicle manufacturer promotes in its home city, and is pleased with her idea of using locations at the company headquarters for some of the performances. ‘€e venue, I think, is an incredible place,’ she tells me the next day at a café in the old town. ‘We need to adjust one or two things, but I think it’s really worth it because it’s such an unusual space. Jean-Yves and Gautier were so happy and so excited about playing there. I.think acoustically it really works. Of course, we’ll have to sort out how to deal with the sunshine – maybe start a bit later. But my goal in the beginning was to .nd new places for the concerts; not to get stuck with this one concert hall in the middle of the city, which people tend to avoid because it’s a.little bit too traditional. You need to propose something more modern and new.’

€e festival is one way that the company supports the local population, more than forty thousand of whom work at the Ingolstadt site. Indeed, among its various other musical and non-musical cultural initiatives is the Georgian Chamber Orchestra, a group that Batiashvili’s own father joined after the family moved from Georgia to Germany in the early 1990s, during a period of civil war in the country. ‘€e Georgian Chamber Orchestra, originally based in Tbilisi, was touring Germany during that diffcult time at the end of the Soviet Union,’ she explains. ‘€ere was the crisis in Georgia, and when the players performed in Ingolstadt they were Off ered the chance to stay here by the city. So they became the city’s orchestra because Ingolstadt didn’t have its own.’

Batiashvili’s personal links with both city and festival made her an obvious face for the event when it came to appointing a new artistic director. €e time was right for her, too. ‘I think ten years ago it would not have been the right moment for me because I was in the middle of building my personal artistic circle. Now, it’s the nicest thing to be able to ask all the people I have worked with if they want to come to the festival on a friendly basis. It’s a very natural thing.’

Batiashvili presented her first season under the theme ‘Fantastique!’, with artists including Gidon Kremer, Paavo Järvi, the Hermès Quartet, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. She also invited Les Siècles with François-Xavier Roth to play at the open-air concert that traditionally closes the festival; and as this was to fall on Bastille Day (14 July) in the year of the 150th anniversary of Berlioz’s death, it seemed appropriate to have a French orchestra playing the Symphonie fantastique.

‘I DON’T FEEL COMFORTABLE PERFORMING CHAMBER MUSIC AFTER ONE OR TWO REHEARSALS WITH PEOPLE I DON’T KNOW VERY WELL. I NEED TIME FOR US TO FEEL LIKE ONE’

Earlier in the festival there was also a concert at Ingolstadt’s concert hall which showcased Les Vents Français playing concertos of various woodwind combinations. ‘Les Vents Français was a natural choice because it’s connected to François [Leleux, Batiashvili’s oboist husband], and [flautist] Emmanuel Pahud is a close friend. To have a fantastic wind ensemble is something that doesn’t happen every day. Not so interesting for The Strad !’ On the contrary, I had particularly wanted to be at that concert: it’s a shame if string players restrict their musical curiosity. ‘It’s amazing how they create the sound,’ she says, ‘and how they play together – because they don’t have bows. I always wonder: how do they do that? Of course, they breathe together, but it’s a different technique. We always watch each other’s bows, and you can see Jean-Yves always watching our bows. But with a wind ensemble there’s a different dimension.’

Her concert with Capuçon and Thibaudet was not the first time they had played together as a trio, having toured their programme of Shostakovich (op.8), Mendelssohn (op.66) and Ravel (his only piano trio) in Europe in November 2018. When it comes to chamber music, however, Batiashvili is reluctant to get involved with the kind of festival experiences where star guests are invited to perform together in short-term partnerships. ‘I tried but I realised that personally I don’t feel comfortable performing chamber music after one or two rehearsals with people I don’t know very well. They can be the best musicians in the world but I need time to rehearse in order to get to know all the parts and for us to feel like one. That’s why I’m giving up a bit on those festivals that bring people together for a short period. There are other people who feel good about it, and they should do it – but it’s not my thing. In summer, it’s so easy to become super-busy because so many people have their own festival – and now I can say that I’m one of those people! But it’s very easy to find yourself jumping from one festival to another for the whole summer. I also want to give my violin (a 1739 Guarneri ‘del Gesù’) two or three weeks’ sleep and just rest.’ She agrees that such periods of time can have a creative function beyond simply giving you a chance to recover from fatigue. ‘Yes, I think creative ideas usually come when you are thinking about something else or are not thinking concretely about anything. You need to give your brain time off to have these creative moments. If it’s all about planning, planning, planning then you will end up being a musical machine.

We are machines anyway because we plan so far ahead and we don’t allow ourselves enough space to be spontaneous and to change our mind and say, “Actually, I don’t really want to do this any more; I wanted that two years ago but now I’m somewhere else.”’

So Batiashvili’s need to spend plenty of time working on a project does not hinder her ability to be spontaneous. Nor, she says, is she looking for her collaborators to bring approaches that are similar to hers. ‘Of course, there are one or two people who know me better than others and somehow that’s the most natural thing. But I think it’s very important to expand your possibilities; to drag yourself to the limits, as well. I’ve often been very scared of what I believe I can’t do. Even being artistic director of a festival – I probably would have thought I couldn’t do that. But I decided to expand my limits, giving my best and stepping a little bit over the line to confront my fears.’

Some of Batiashvili’s closest working partnerships as a violinist have been with conductors and, to a certain degree, orchestras (she was artist-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic, 2014–15, for example). I recall her explaining during a previous meeting how important Christian Thielemann’s contribution was to her interpretation of the Brahms Violin Concerto recorded with the Dresden Staatskapelle; and sure enough, on listening to the first movement of that recording you very much get the impression of an orchestra releasing her at her first entry – as one dancer might launch another into a solo – rather than merely setting the scene.

‘They influence me a lot musically because of their personality,’ she says about her favoured conductors more generally. ‘It’s not only about conducting and playing together; it’s more an exchange. In the long term, with Barenboim for sure, you get a lifetime’s lesson. But it’s not only a lesson – it’s two colleagues communicating with each other. That is due to respect, and to the fact that he likes to receive energy from younger musicians. Like Karajan. You know that all these fantastic musicians need more and more connection with young musicians as they get older. It’s a mixture of his wisdom and his life experience connected to what is happening today and what is going to happen tomorrow.’

It was with Daniel Barenboim that she recorded the Sibelius and Tchaikovsky concertos with the Berlin Staatskapelle (2015–16). Another collaborator on disc is Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who accompanies her on the piano in Tchaikovsky romances on a 2013 release, and conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Europe on an all-Prokofiev disc (2018) featuring both concertos and some ballet arrangements for violin and orchestra by her father, Tamás. She and Paavo Järvi, meanwhile, are frequent partners in concert.

TOP PHOTO DVO⅄ÁK PRAGUE INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL. CIRCLE PHOTO THOMAS BARTILLA

With Yannick I have a very special friendship that gives me a feeling of being one family and breathing together. I also have a very long friendship with Paavo, and we connect in a different way: the Baltic countries [Järvi is from Estonia] and Georgia each understand on a political basis the fight for freedom, and for a better life enjoyed by the Western part of the world. The dream is to make it a reality and always to fight for it, even on a daily basis. I admire Paavo very much. Now that I know these conductors better, I have an idea of what to expect and how to make a start on any given project, depending on what and where we are playing.’

More unfamiliar was her work on a film soundtrack, playing Ilan Eshkeri’s music for the film The White Crow (2018), in which Ralph Fiennes, directing, plays Rudolf Nureyev’s ballet master. ‘When you look at these images and you accompany them with your performance, it’s not only about playing beautifully: you have to produce the emotion that the director wants to create in that scene. It’s more than just an abstract feeling; it’s really very direct.’ It also gave her a new creative partnership to explore. ‘Ralph Fiennes, of course, is such an incredible artist himself. So much more than just an film actor, he comes with his theatre experience as well and his incredibly interesting personality – he has so much to say. He even came to one of my trio concerts in London, and he loved it, apparently. We had an interview for Vogue, and I remember us speaking about very similar experiences on stage as a musician and as an actor.’

Batiashvili says she would be interested in collaborating with other artists in future, although she would be unlikely to go into anything blindly. ‘If I do something, I want to know where I’m going, rather than taking on something completely unexpected. I would want to have an idea of the direction the project was taking.’

She is similarly choosy, although guided by her instincts, when helping other musicians. ‘As soon as I’m touched by something, I want to do it. I don’t want to go looking for it because it has to have a very natural flow. I do have young violinists in Georgia that I will continue supporting in many different ways. It’s not only about helping them come to study or to play for a conductor or get the right instrument. It’s all sorts of things, depending on what they need most. I’m not a teacher – I don’t have time at the moment and I feel this is not the right moment for me to become a teacher – but I still want to give something to young people. So this for me is the main goal.’

She has a particular interest, with those caveats, in helping string players in Georgia because of the tendency she observes of good teachers and good musicians to leave that country, meaning that the next generation of talent can get stuck. She is, however, sanguine about the future of music more generally: ‘I think music has never been as active as it is today. We worry about the wrong things. We are not in danger of losing audiences, or concerts, programmes and festivals – these are all very healthy. Of course, there is certainly the danger of forcing young people to create their profile too early, and to be different. Everybody is under pressure to be different from their peers and colleagues in order to be visible. It’s very important for young artists to trust that if something is not working out today, there might be a completely different situation in two years or five years, and it’s their job to keep going and exploring and getting to know other people and themselves.’

Her own future, having just taken up the Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto no.3 at Barenboim’s suggestion, includes returning after 15 years to the Berg Violin Concerto. She will be performing it around Europe with the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle, a contrast to Szymanowski’s First Concerto, on which she is also concentrating in the spring. ‘The Berg is not repertoire that gives me as much pleasure as, say, the Szymanowski. It involves playing differently from the way you would in a Romantic concerto or the Szymanowski, which is very sensual. Berg is more concrete about things. But I’m very happy to come back to it, because I’m so positive that with the right people you can sometimes open your heart to something that you never thought of.’

CITY LIGHTS

CHRIS SINGER

Lisa Batiashvili discusses her forthcoming album

This is such a personal project, and I’ve been preparing it for over two years. It’s about twelve cities that have been important in my life – in a musical sense, or because of people I have met. To each city I have dedicated a different kind of music, which I associate with the place through my childhood, P\ PHPRULHV OPV RU IRONORUH 7KH LGHD LV DOVR WR UHDFK RXW WR people to stimulate their own connections and emotions. The album features special guests, for example Miloš on guitar and Till Brönner on trumpet. Till is a jazz musician, but we have managed to perform a piece together without forcing him into the classical sphere or me into jazz. There’s Katie Melua, too, who is also Georgian, but moved to Britain when she was eight years old. Of course the album will include tributes to Paris, Munich and Berlin – the latter is a very important city for my musical career. London is there as well. There will also be Tbilisi, Georgia, but my personal musical highlight is a medley on the themes of Charlie Chaplin. He belongs to the whole world, not just to one city, and I really wanted to record some of his music. There is a whole range of different styles on this recording, LQFOXGLQJ %DFK ‘YRě￡N &KDSOLQ 0LFKHO /HJUDQG 3LD]]ROOD DQG a couple of other surprises. I get so much pleasure and energy from performing such great music. The range of genres means I’m not bound up in the traditional seriousness of music making – LQVWHDG LW RZV DQG OLIWV PH XS DV D PXVLFLDQ , WKLQN VRPHWLPHV we practical musicians need to lighten up our lives a little bit.

City Lights will be released on Deutsche Grammophon in 2020