Tsotne Zedginidze performs new compositions, Schubert, and Ravel

Georgian virtuoso Tsotne Zedginidze is the first soloist to take the spotlight at this year’s Tsinandali Festival, presenting a vibrant and audacious program that showcases repertoire favorites and original compositions. The prodigious pianist takes on Ravel’s resplendent Gaspard de la nuit, one of the most difficult works for piano ever written. Its three movements—Ondine, Le Gibet, and Scarbo—are based on individual poems by Aloysius Bertrand describing fantastical creatures and mystical spirits. Shimmering tremolo notes and arpeggios complement a haunting, colorful melody in Ondine, an ominous B-Flat octave ostinato resonates throughout Le Gibet, and dynamic leaps across the piano characterize the fiendishly difficult Scarbo. Such is the technical mastery required for this piece that even Ravel admitted that he perhaps “got a little carried away”... The pianist also performs Schubert’s four Impromptus, Op. 90, some of the most beautifully expressive and poignant pieces of the piano repertoire. Written just a year before Schubert died—at around the same time as he was composing his song cycle Die Winterreise—the compositions are imbued with a sense of deep melancholy and introspection.