‘Night Serenades’ festival to bring award-winning musical artists to Batumi and Tbilisi

Award-winning pianist Sandro Nebieridze, celebrated mezzo soprano Nino Surguladze and guest artists will bring a celebration of classical music to the seaside city of Batumi and capital Tbilisi within this year’s Batumi-Tbilisi International Festival ‘Night Serenades’ starting next week.

In two locations selected for the festival — founded in the early 1980s by internationally celebrated violinist Liana Isakadze — the featured artists will perform in a five-show programme.

Nebieridze — winner of the Moscow Grand Piano Competition Grand Prix — will open the long-standing event at the Batumi Professional State Drama Theatre, where he and trumpeter David Shamanauri will be involved in renditions of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Samuel Barber.

Led by the festival’s principal conductor Vakhtang Matchavariani, the concert will see performances of the Serenade by Tchaikovsky, Adagio for Strings by Barber and the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Shostakovich.

Anna-Liisa Bezrodny is a recipient of the Heifetz International Violin Competition, among other honours. Photo: annaliisabezrodny.com.

It will be followed by two more evenings at the Grand Hall of the seaside venue, with the first introducing violinists Nana Iashvili and Anna-Liisa Bezrodny and cellist Jan-Erik Gustafsson, conducted by Pantelis Kogiamis, in a show of Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony and the timeless The Four Seasons by Vivaldi.

The latter evening will bring contemporary works by Benjamin Britten, Pablo Sarasate and Georgian composers Sulkhan Tsintsadze and Vaja Azarashvili to listeners. Bezrodny and Gustafsson will be on stage for the performance.

Moving the festival stage to the capital city, organisers will host two shows at the Tbilisi State Conservatoire, with the first event introducing Kazakhstan state Forte Trio in Serenade for Strings by Edwar Elgar and Trio for Piano and Strings in G minor by Bedrich Smetana.

The second half of the evening will again bring Nebieridze and Shamanauri to the audience, this time in renditions of Langsamer Satz by von Webern and Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

Georgian opera singer Nino Surguladze (right), seen attending the press conference for the festival, will feature in the vocal bill of the event. Photo: Night Serenades Festival.

The concluding event of the festival will bring a surprise to music enthusiasts, with a vocal performance of the annual celebration featuring acclaimed mezzo soprano Nino Surguladze in El Amor Brujo by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla.

Surguladze said ahead of the festival she was glad to bring the vocal element for the first time in a while with the piece “full of love, passion and the best Spanish folk melodies”.

Following its initial editions in the 1980s ‘Night Serenades’ was restored in 2009, after a long break due to civil war and unrest in Georgia in the 1990s.

Artistic direction of the event is shared by Isakadze — winner of the Jean Sibelius International Violin Competition and the Marguerite Long and Jacques Thibaud International Competition, among other awards — and her cousin Giorgi Isakadze since 2018.

This year’s festival will run between August 25-September 4.