Aug 20, 2015 | Sabine Wiedemann News Video UNESCO Artist for Peace Elisso Bolkvadze
The video gives impressions of the recording session with Elisso Bolkvadze. The Georgian pianist, an UNESCO Artist for Peace and a local hero in her native Georgia, presents Prokofiev's Second Piano Sonata and Schubert's Impromptus D 899 in glowing and lyrical interpretations.
Sergei Prokofiev and Franz Schubert - a highly intelligent combination, highlighting the position of the two composers between tradition and innovation. Prokofiev's sonata oeuvre is signifi¬cantly more present in Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union than in Central Europe where, at best, his Seventh Sonata is only occasionally programmed. Yet with his nine complet¬ed sonatas, spanning his career from his youth up to the period shortly before his death in 1953, Prokofiev created a musical cosmos similar in range to Shostakovich's string quartets. Hailing from the Geor¬gian capital Tbilisi, Elisso Bolkvadze has chosen the Second Sonata (1912), where Prokofiev adopts an incredibly delicate tone which, at the same time, appears aggressive in its motoric energy, reflecting the modernist spirit of the Russian capital of St Petersburg before the First World War.
Elisso Bolkvadze has complemented this with Schubert's four Impromptus D. 899, a popular cycle whose innova¬tion is often underestimated. For, alongside his great piano sonatas, Schubert always put new forms to the test with compact, and sometimes also programmatic, messages. This also holds true for the Impromptus, where pure colour is combined with lyrical, dramatic and gestural aspects.
Georgian pianist Elisso Bolkvadze was selected as a UNESCO Artist for Peace in January 2015. She has won numerous international piano competitions, including the Van Cliburn, Vianna da Motta and Dublin Interna¬tional Piano Competitions. She is regularly invited to perform as a soloist alongside international orchestras, and also gives recitals in major concert halls across Europe and the United States. A superstar in her home country, she was awarded the prestigious national "Medal of Honour of the Georgian Government" in 1993. In 2013, Elisso Bolkvadze founded her own charitable foundation, "Lyra", which supports talented young Georgian pianists. She is the Artistic Director of the Batumi Music Festival in Georgia.
Release date of the production (Germany) is August 14th 2015.
The second audite-album with Elisso Bolkvadze is planned for 2016.