Pianists in the Diamond: Giorgi Gigashvili (GE)

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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 inthe 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 still Clara Wieck, the daughter of Schumann's piano teacher Friedrich Wieck. The two would not marry until several years later, after years of opposition from her father.