concert Daniel Barenboim conducts Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Scriabin — With Lisa Batiashvili at the Salzburg Festival 2018 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto brims full of the composer’s unforgettable melodies and intoxicating rhythms, the essence of the Romantic solo concerto since Brahms: expansive lyrical landscapes, nationalist tributes, and introspective beauty that blossom fully in the hands of the extraordinary Georgian-German violinist Lisa Batiashvili. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra continues with Debussy’s La mer, an intense symphonic poem that uses daring polychromatic instrumentation to transport listeners out of the concert hall and plunge them into the waves of one of mother nature’s wildest wonders. The program closes with Alexander Scriabin’s brilliant Poem of Ecstasy, which the composer himself described as “my best composition.”