Tamta Magradze | Liszt | Franck | Ravel | Schubert

Hard, harder, hardest: that’s easy for her. The pianist Tamta Magradze, who was born in 1995 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and who is the winner of more than ten international music competitions, performs her demanding repertoire with fascinating ease and expressiveness. “When you’re just thinking about the music and not about the technical difficulties, then it’s really fun,” says the graduate of the Franz Liszt School of Music in Weimar. She has a particularly close connection to the music of its namesake — as she will demonstrate at her Lucerne debut. In keeping with this year’s “Open End” Festival theme, Magradze begins her Romantic concert program with Liszt’s powerfully swelling variations on themes from Handel’s opera Almira, finally culminating in the rarely performed Grosses Konzertsolo by the Austro-Hungarian composer. A brilliant revision of the earlier Grand solo de concert and at the same time the basis for Liszt’s later Concerto pathétique for two pianos, this transitional work, with its multiple versions, represents a truly open ending for a truly virtuoso Debut recital.