Award-winning Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili brings a spiritual evening of Liszt to a canal-side venue in the heart of Hackney.
Hackney is the kind of place that can make one feel very uncool very quickly. Throw a stone, and you’ll find a teeming handful of muraled, hip, hole-in-the-wall arts venues on your way to retrieve it. So it was jarring to witness an audience show up so emphatically to one of those venues – the canal-side No 90 bar – for a Wednesday night of classical piano.
This very likely had to do with the fact that this wasn’t any ordinary musician. Mariam Batsashvili is a young Georgian pianist whose mastery of Liszt has brought her critical acclaim the world over. After winning the 10th Franz Liszt Piano Competition in 2014, she then went on to become a Rising Star of the European Concert Hall Organisation and a BBC Young Generation Artist. And in her own unique way, she has become somewhat of an internet phenomenon, sharing piano tips to a sizable social media following.
All this, however, still didn’t fully explain why this young Hackney crowd was so happy to hear this young pianist run through a program of pieces including Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13, Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata, and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. That is until she took the mic after the first piece of the evening and offered perhaps the most endearing opener to a classical music concert I’ve ever heard: she told us we were going to be a part of her PhD research on Liszt, and would any of us like to stay afterward to give her feedback?
I was watching an artist making classical music something not only more accessible to younger audiences but also fresh and fun. Maybe even Hackney-level hip.
She explained that her dissertation aims to prove that Liszt was a spiritual composer – something she apparently gets a lot of flack for within the classical community. On a normal Wednesday evening, the esoteric quarrels of classical music academia would happily sail right over my head. But when she started to play her next song – Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude – even I was ready to go to battle for her against the fuddy-duddy army of Liszt gatekeepers.
The crowd also could have been excited to be there because – as I later discovered – most of them had crowdfunded it. The evening was a part of Through the Noise’s programme of Noisenights – crowdfunded gigs that bring world-renowned classical musicians from prestigious wood-paneled concert halls to local, independent, and intimate venues. From established soloists and ensembles to up-and-coming classical artists, Noisenights were created to serve a new era of global, more accessible classical music. The purchase of every ticket goes toward the event – only once it’s been fully funded are a few remaining tickets sold to the public. As the arts face ever-multiplying threats to their well-being, it was thrilling to know that almost everyone standing in darkness before the Yamaha grand piano was there that evening because they’d quite literally made it possible themselves.
After her first piece, someone in the audience unraveled a giant Georgian flag. Batsashvili stopped what she was saying to thank them for coming and for representing her home country. The crowd in this intimate Hackney venue erupted in applause. It was clear at that moment that Through the Noise’s refreshing mission was and will continue to be a booming success. Batsashvili not only represents a younger generation of classical musicians but also invites a fresh modern audience to, in its own way and in its own space, enjoy it.