BUNIATISHVILI, KHATIA

The young pianist Khatia Buniatishvili is a unique phenomenon in classical music: her playing and her
recordings for Sony Classical are highly praised, with the instinct of a film director she manages to tell
stories with the music and put them in the right light, and she achieves them huge numbers of people,
including many younger ones, on social media. All of her albums reached high positions in the
classical music charts, and Buniatishvili received numerous awards for her recordings, including the
Echo Klassik Prize. The new album "Labyrinth" is just as imaginative, sensitive and philosophical as
the pianist herself. "Labyrinth" pursues the immeasurable search that defines human life. As in a film, it
traces a development through the music chosen by Buniatisvhili: procrastination, melancholy,
sensuality, joy and sorrow - all from the point of view of a woman enlightened through self-reflection
and cleverness. The album, recorded in the "Grande Salle Pierre Boulez" in the Philharmonie de Paris,
creates its own, almost unreal space by making use of the pictorial tonal language of composers from
Scarlatti to Morricone, from Bach to Glass. "The labyrinth," says the Paris-based pianist, who also
speaks fluent German, "is fate and creation, dead end and redemption - a polyphony of life, the
senses, the remembering dreams, the neglected present; unexpected or expected twists and turns in
what is spoken or the unspoken ... the labyrinth of our mind ". With the album "Labyrinth", Buniatishivili
presents her most colorful and varied selection of music to date. With her typical uncompromising
attitude, she puts her extraordinary piano playing at the service of the imagination and describes - with
all joys and sorrows - a woman's dance with life. The album contains i.a. Film music by Philip Glass
(from "The Hours") and the recently deceased Ennio Morricone (Debora´s theme from "Once Upon a
Time in America"), piano pictures by Erik Satie and Serge Gainsbourg, a Latin American dance by
Heitor Villa-Lobos Estonian prayer by Arvo Pärt, a Hungarian etude by György Ligeti, but also John
Cage's famous presentation of musical silence and works by Scarlatti, Brahms, Bach, Rachmaninow,
Chopin, Couperin and Liszt. Khatia Buniatishvili also arranged some pieces for the album himself,
such as Bach's "Badinerie" for piano four hands and his "Sicilienne" BWV 596 based on Vivaldi's D
minor concerto RV 565. When listening, Labyrinth unfolds a magical pull, a labyrinth of music , in
which there are always new, fascinating twists - and which you actually don't want to find out