Pianists in the Diamond: Giorgi Gigashvili (GE)
Hear a heartfelt and wide-ranging programme for solo piano featuring music by the Mendelssohn siblings, the Schumanns, and Sergei Prokofiev’s great “War Sonata”.
With an interest in both classical, electronic and Georgian folk music, Giorgi Gigashvili is a versatile musician with a broad artistic palette. That versatility also colours the evening's programme, which ranges from 19th-century romantic songs to the great "War Sonata" by Prokofiev, which the composer completed in 1944.
Prokofiev began the sonata in 1939, working on it alongside the piano sonatas Nos. 6 and 7 during the midst of World War II and while the Soviet Union was under Stalin's dictatorial rule. A few years earlier, Prokofiev had returned to the Soviet Union after many years in the West and had to be on good terms with the regime. In 1939, he received a request to write a celebratory work on the occasion of Stalin's 60th birthday, which he did while pretending to admire Stalin. The work became "Zdravitsa" ("Cheers"). It was on this basis that he began to work the sonatas, which later became known as the “War Sonatas”.
The concert opens in a very different vein, however, moving to the mid-19th century with two collections of Romantic Songs Without Words for piano by the siblings Fanny Mendelssohn and Felix Mendelssohn. This is followed by Clara Schumann’s variations on the theme from Bunte Blätter, Op. 99, written by her husband, Robert Schumann. The variations are among the last piano works Clara Schumann composed. She performed the work for him on the last birthday he spent with his family, before being admitted to a sanatorium the following year, where her husband remained until his early death in 1856. Inspired by Clara Schumann, the young Johannes Brahms, a close friend of the Schumann couple, also composed his own Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, which he dedicated to Clara.
The first half concludes with Robert Schumann's first piano sonata, a heartfelt work also dedicated to Clara, who at the time was a young Clara Wieck, daughter of Schumann's piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, that would not before several years later become his wife – after years of opposition from her father.
Cast
Pianist Giorgi Gigashvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2000. He has been nominated as ECHO Rising Star 2025/26 European Concert Hall Organisation) and has received numerous awards, including first prize at the Vigo International Piano Competition in 2019. He released the critically acclaimed album "Meeting my Shadow" in 2023 with music by Beethoven and Messiaen, among others, and will release another album featuring music by Prokofiev in 2026. He plays on some of Europe’s most prestigious stages, including the Barbican Centre in London, the Philharmonie de Paris and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.
