How does a career begin? A collaboration? A performance? Answers from and about the Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili.
It’s only a few metres from the stage door to the grand piano. Some pianists just scurry through, as if they want to get behind the keys as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. Not so Khatia Buniatishvili: her entrance is as flawless as her designer dress; she beams out to the audience and the orchestra, glamorous, open, and utterly present. What she then offers musically is usually just the same: communicative in every direction, glamorous, open, and utterly present.
First attempts at the piano at the age of three, initially taught by her mother, first public performance with an orchestra at the age of six: that sounds like a textbook recipe for the start of a great solo career. But for Khatia Buniatishvili, music was also a refuge. She grew up in the Georgian city of Batumi, which at the time had a population of around 120,000 and was situated directly on the Black Sea. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia was plagued by war and crime; there were often days without electricity, and running water was only available at certain times. As a child, she once said, she sought freedom above all else: in music, in books, and in her imagination.
Khatia Buniatishvili made her first far-reaching political decision in 2006, at the age of 19: she decided to stop performing in Russia. Since then, she has set out her views on dictators and wars in countless interviews.
Khatia Buniatishvili’s collaboration with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich began in 2018 on a tour to China, Taiwan and South Korea. The story of Paavo Järvi and the orchestra had also just begun at that time; he was conducting the concerts as Music Director-designate. But the conductor and the pianist had known each other for a long time. They first shared the stage at the Rheingau Music Festival in 2012; since then, they have performed together in all sorts of corners of the world, and their joint discography includes piano concertos by Chopin and Rachmaninoff. “I admire Khatia,” says Paavo Järvi. “She is an authentic and original personality, strong-willed and spirited. And she is one of those pianists whose skills are secretly envied by everyone else.”
The moment when a successful soloist becomes a superstar can never be pinpointed – and this is no different for Khatia Buniatishvili. Was it in 2008, at her acclaimed debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall, after which she was suddenly in great demand everywhere? In 2012, when she received her first Echo Klassik award? In 2015, when she performed with the band Coldplay? Or in 2025, when an asteroid was named after her?
Where does it all begin? Khatia Buniatishvili, answer no. 1: “The piece is a given. But I am free to decide with what feelings I approach it.”
Answer No. 2: “Honesty is the beginning of art.”
Khatia Buniatishvili, the featured artist, presents two piano concertos, and in both she gets going almost immediately without much of a prelude: in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, she begins after just five bars of the orchestra’s introduction, in fortissimo. In Grieg’s concerto, she begins after just a brief timpani roll – also in fortissimo. And to top it all, these works are right at the start of their respective programmes! In other words: there is no settling-in period, neither for the soloist nor for the audience. She places herself – or rather, her artistry – at the centre of the action right from the very first seconds. Anyone familiar with her knows that she will remain there for the rest of the programme.
