Friday 6 February | Martin James Bartlett and Mariam Batashvili (piano duets)

Martin James Bartlett

Piano

Martin James Bartlett possesses a fearless technique and plays with a maturity and elegance far beyond his years. He was the inaugural recipient of the Prix Serdang, awarded in 2022 by Rudolf Buchbinder to a young pianist forging an international career. An exclusive artist with Warner Classics, Bartlett’s recordings have earned five-star reviews and top accolades from Gramophone, The Times, and BBC Music Magazine. Highlights of the 2025/26 season include performances across the UK, USA, and Europe. He begins with Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in the U.S., followed by recitals in Florida. In the UK, he returns to Wigmore Hall and performs with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Bournemouth Symphony. He appears at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and collaborates once again with conductor Jonathan Bloxham for a Mozart–Prokofiev festival with the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie.

Recent seasons have seen debuts at the Lucerne and Moritzburg Festivals, a return to the Concertgebouw, and a major U.S. tour with performances in Cincinnati and San Francisco. He has toured Philip Glass’s Tirol Concerto with the LGT Young Soloists, including performances at the Berlin Konzerthaus and Vienna Musikverein, culminating in a gala for the Prince and Princess of Liechtenstein.

An exclusive artist with Warner Classics, Bartlett has released three acclaimed albums on

the label, with the next release in March 2026. Bartlett rose to fame in 2014 as BBC Young Musician of the Year, soon after making his Proms debut with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. He has since performed with all five BBC orchestras and at major venues across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. A graduate of the Royal College of Music, where he now serves as Assistant Professor, Bartlett also held the RCM Benjamin Britten Piano Fellowship and made his conducting debut with the London Mozart Players.

Mariam Batashvili

Piano

Charisma, brilliance, and depth of expression are qualities with which Mariam Batsashvili captivates not only live audiences worldwide. The Georgian pianist has also long secured her place among the top ranks in the recording and streaming market since signing exclusively with the major label Warner in 2019: another highlight in a steep career that has taken her to over 30 countries and the world’s most important concert halls to date. Besides major musical centers like Berlin, London, Paris, or Vienna, Mariam Batsashvili is a frequent guest at international festivals such as the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, where she debuted in 2019, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, the Milan Festival Piano City, the Festival Piano aux Jacobins in Toulouse, or the Beethovenfest Bonn. Outside Europe as well, Mariam Batsashvili is among the most sought-after interpreters of the great piano literature from Bach to late Romanticism.

At least since her internationally acclaimed victories at the Franz Liszt Competitions in Weimar (2011) and Utrecht (2014), Mariam Batsashvili’s career has been closely linked to the name of this central musical figure of the 19th century – who was also the focus of her Warner debut album “Chopin Liszt” in 2019. After her first encounter during lessons with Natalie Natsvlishvili in her native Tbilisi, Mariam Batsashvili was able to further expand her Liszt experiences as a student of Grigory Gruzman in Weimar and through inspiring exchanges with legendary Liszt interpreters like Leslie Howard. Besides her distinctive artistry of touch (Anschlagskunst), media such as the British Observer or the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” praise not least Batsashvili’s feel for the “inner world” and the “nonchalant poetry” of Liszt’s music, highlighting her soulful playing even in the most virtuoso passages.

Beyond Liszt’s works, the pianist – who in the past decade was part of two of the world’s most exclusive young talent programs as a “Rising Star” of the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) and as a “BBC New Generation Artist” – earns enthusiastic reactions from audiences and the specialist press for her interpretations of the piano works of Schubert, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. Also in the current 2024/25 season, she will return to major concert halls such as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg or the BBC Proms with this repertoire; a further album release is also planned for spring 2025. The fact that Mariam Batsashvili is also very successful in the social media sphere, with over 70,000 followers, is thanks to the illustrative short tutorials on technical and performance practice issues that she has regularly provided to professional and amateur pianists on Instagram for several years.

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