Lisa Batiashvili: Secret Love Letters
Deutsche Grammophon

There's a hint of the illicit about the title Secret Love Letters, which calls to mind clandestine affairs and dangerous liaisons. If violinist Lisa Batiashvili's new album isn't quite as provocative as all that, there's certainly ample romance and passion in its four works and her performances with pianist Giorgi Gigashvili and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin's direction. She pairs with the latter for Karol Szymanowski's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1 and Ernest Chausson's Poème, the orchestral works nicely framed by intimate duet treatments of César Franck's Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major and Claude Debussy's “Beau soir.”

In the way that it abstractly alludes to emotional articulation than stating it verbally, the violin is arguably better than the human voice for expressing concealed desire. Feelings that are difficult to put into words find their natural expression in the vocal-like yearning of the instrument, especially when an artist such as Batiashvili is so adept at communicating it. Secret Love Letters might be the Georgian-born German violinist's first recording with a US orchestra, but she's performed live with Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra many times and has developed a rapport with them that's wholly evident on the seventy-one-minute release.

The project's romantic angle is already present in Franck's sonata, not only for the fact that it was written in 1886 as a wedding present for the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and his bride Louise Bourdeau but for the intimate connection established between the violin and piano in its four parts. There's both tenderness and passion in the dialogue conducted between Batiashvili and Gigashvili, and at twenty-seven minutes, the work is also no minor lead-in but a substantial statement. Both instrumentalists benefit enormously from the duet presentation, he showing himself to be a sensitive and responsive partner and she using her formidable technique and ravishing tone to give moving voice to Franck's writing. The opening “Allegretto ben moderato” captivates with an expansive main theme that Batiashvili delivers gracefully. Embodying the intensity of rising passion, tension builds perceptibly as the movement advances and in the “Allegro” that follows. The slow movement is memorable for the authority of their playing, which is sustained at a remarkably high level throughout all of the music's many changes, and the singing “Allegretto poco mosso” concluding the work charms with its joy and optimism.

Batiashvili describes Szymanowski's violin concerto as “a piece full of love and pain deriving from the restricted love of a man who was in love with another man at a time when this was outlawed both legally and morally.” Unfolding in a single movement across twenty-six minutes, the piece is a wide-ranging, labyrinthine, and at times fantastical travelogue pervaded by mystery, sensuality, exoticism, eroticism, and ecstasy and located, in her words, “between a dream world and tough reality.” Written in Ukraine during WWI and first performed in Warsaw in November 1922, the work offers the violinist a magnificent showcase for her seductive, vibrato-rich tone, while its arrangement grants the orchestra multiple opportunities for vivid tone painting. Alternately peaceful and tempestuous, the concerto progresses seamlessly through its contrasting sections, such changes rendered fluid by the flowing lyricism of the violin and the carefully calibrated pacing by Nézet-Séguin of the accompaniment. Among the memorable moments are the lovely swooning episode that arrives eighteen minutes into the performance and the cadenza by Batiashvili thereafter.

October 2022