At 32, Lisa Batiashvili is no longer among the youngest of the innumerable brilliant and beautiful young female violinists on the scene. But her brilliance has deepened superbly since emerging from the BBC's New Generation scheme in 2001, as has her emotional stamina. Both of these qualities were in abundance at this performance of Shostakovich's first violin concerto with Esa-Pekka Salonen (with whom she recorded the work last year) and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
The results were spellbinding. From the Nocturne's snaking opening statement, Batiashvili chained herself to the writhing melody, her expressive style seamlessly matched to the collision between public and private emotion at the heart of the work. This conflict is at its starkest in the exhausting cadenza, where the soloist's musical personality breaks itself down to nothing before re-emerging in rampaging gestures, with a force derived from a fragile hold on despair. Like Beckett's narrator, the violinist must go on, can't go on, goes on.
So Batiashvili went on, with an encore from Shostakovich's Dances of the Dolls, further confirming the seamless expressive marriage she has formed with Salonen and the Philharmonia. Indeed, in the rest of this all-Russian programme, the orchestra were at the top of their game. Beginning with a brilliantly characterful account of Shostakovich's Age of Gold suite, and taking in a mostly excellent and consistently riveting Petrushka, the concert concluded with a knockout performance of Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini, in which an entire evening of pent-up energy released itself in a fireball of sound.
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