Khatia Buniatishvili

Georgian pianist, born 1987. She studied with Tengiz Amirejibi at the Tbilisi State Conservatoire and with Oleg Maisenberg at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, and made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2008. A Sony Classical exclusive artist since 2011, her albums include Liszt, Chopin, Motherland, Kaleidoscope, Rachmaninoff, Schubert and Labyrinth; she has twice won the ECHO Klassik. She is known for taking wide liberties with tempo and dynamics — a piece in her hands often does not sound like most other readings of it. That is also the source of the argument about her: what one listener hears as risk and spontaneity, another hears as rewriting the text.