Mariam Batsashvili: Romantic Piano Masters

Master of Arrangement: Pianist Mariam Batsashvili's New Album on Franz Liszt "The Georgian-born pianist leaves nothing to be desired with the generous warmth of her interpretations," Gramophone music magazine wrote of Mariam Batsashvili's readings of works by Chopin and Liszt. The Romantic Piano Masters recording is also all about Franz Liszt and his contemporaries. But it is not Liszt's own works that the pianist focuses on, but his piano arrangements that the famous keyboard artist made to compositions by his colleagues. Among them are songs by Franz Schubert as well as works for large symphonic ensembles, for example the waltz from Gounod's opera Faust. Liszt's ability to transfer the sound of an orchestra to the piano keyboard is unsurpassed for Mariam Batsashvili. He evokes "the energy of the whole universe" with his transposition of Wagner's Isoldes Liebestod, the pianist enthuses. But Liszt's then artistic (and now almost forgotten) rival Sigismund Thalberg is also represented on the album with his highly virtuosic arrangement of themes from Bellini's opera La sonnambula. In turn, Harold Bauer's piano arrangement of César Franck's organ work Prélude Fugue et Variation creates a very different mood. "It's a piece to meditate on and ponder - for me, it opens the doors to spirituality," Mariam Batsashvili said. And with the right touch technique, the pianist even has the ability to "create the illusion of an organ in a church acoustic," she adds.