Lisa Batiashvili

Georgian musician (born 1979)

Elisabeth Batiashvili (; born 7 March 1979), professionally known as Lisa Batiashvili, is a prominent Georgian violinist active across Europe and the United States. A former New York Philharmonic artist in residence, she is acclaimed for her "natural elegance, silky sound and the meticulous grace of her articulation".

Batiashvili was born in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, to a violinist father and a pianist mother. She began learning violin with her father from age four. The family left Georgia in 1991 when she was 12 years old, and settled in Germany. She later studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. Mark Lubotsky, her teacher in Hamburg, had been a student of David Oistrakh, for whom Shostakovich wrote his violin concertos. She has also worked with a later BBC New Generation Artist, Ashley Wass, in recital. She made her BBC Proms debut in 2000.

Magnus Lindberg dedicated a violin concerto to her, the world premiere of which she gave at Avery Fisher Hall, New York, on 22 August 2006 and European premiere in Sweden in October. Batiashvili and her husband, oboist François Leleux, commissioned from the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli the double concerto Broken Chant, which they premiered in February 2008 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. She also commissioned a solo violin encore from her compatriot Igor Loboda for solo violin, "Requiem for Ukraine", which was meant to be a statement against conductor Valery Gergiev's cozy relationship with the regime of Vladimir Putin.

Batiashavili was artist in residence with the New York Philharmonic for the 2014/15 season, and with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia for the 2017/18 season. In parallel, she has an artist residency with the NDR Symphony Orchestra. this season's artist in Residence with Berliner Philharmoniker for the 2023/24 season,

Her commercial recordings include Magnus Lindberg's Violin Concerto No. 1 as part of her recording contract with Sony Classical, which she signed in 2007. And more recently, she has recorded several albums with Deutsche Grammophon, including in 2016, an album of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius Violin Concertos and in 2017, an album of Prokofiev's works including his Violin Concertos 1 and 2.