Keyboard passions

What does it mean to be a Romantic? Outside the realm of music we might look for examples in the exalted inspiration of Keats (‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’), the Gothic fantasy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the storm-tossed seascapes and visionary sunsets of Turner. Whatever the medium, the art owes its effect on us to ‘an opposition to the real, the concrete, the predictable and the rational,’ so neatly encapsulated by the definition of Romanticism in Grove’s dictionary of music.

In our world of the piano, two artists blazed a trail for pianists as Romantic artists in their own right, at a time when the roles of composer and performer were still largely indistinguishable: Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt. Not coincidentally, it is these two figures who exercise a potent hold on the imagination of Mariam Batsashvili, whose performances and recordings bear the imprint of a new Romantic.

I met the young Georgian pianist last summer, in happier times, the evening before playing Clara’s Piano Concerto at the BBC Proms with the Ulster Orchestra. As a BBC New Generation Artist she had recently performed the concerto with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales