Rehearsals, rehearsals…
About 8 years ago, my wife and I traveled to Toronto, Canada, to help celebrate my brother in law’s 70th birthday. While I was there, I attended a concert by the Toronto Symphony, and a violinist not known to me at that time, Lisa Batiashvili, performed the Sibelius Violin Concerto. The performance was good, but not great; but the name of the violinist remained with me, probably because of its unusual nature.
Lisa Batiashvili was born in 1979 in Georgia, the daughter of a violinist father and a pianist mother. Her father was her first teacher from the age of 4. She later studied at the Hamburg Musikhochschule. In 1995, she was a prize winner in the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition.
And it turns out that Ms. Batiashvili is still very much in the music scene. In the intervening time she has matured, and her playing has become more authoritative than at the time of that Toronto concert. Back then I saw an emerging artist, and now it’s exciting how much progress she’s made.
The public sees mostly the final results of a huge amount of work that goes into preparing a public performance of music. Give some thought to all the hours of individual practice, let alone the group rehearsals that are required to get a piece of music to the level of perfection that the public expects at a concert of a world-class orchestra and soloist.
Here is Lisa Batiashvili, with Alan Gilbert conducting the New York Philharmonic orchestra, as they rehearse that same Sibelius concerto. The NY Philharmonic is on their 2011 tour of Europe, and their first rehearsal on EUROPE / SPRING 2011 took place the morning of May 12, 2011, in Basel, Switzerland:
And so… after all the hard work of practicing scales, learning your repertoire, and participating in rehearsals, here is Jean Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D minor, with Lisa Batiashvili, Violin, and Sakari Oramo, Conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra:
Tags: Lisa Batiashvili, Sibelius violin concerto