At the 18th Verbier Festival, all eyes were on the rising star of the piano: the Georgian Khatia Buniatishvili.

The 2011 Verbier Festival program featured Buniatishvili in several concerts. The first, at the Salle des Combins, presented her debut with the Verbier Festival Orchestra in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3, a work as lyrical as it is powerful and technically difficult.

Several days later at the Verbier church she presented a solo recital featuring works by Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, the late of which celebrated the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2011. At just 24 years old, Buniatishvili performs these challenging works with such ease that its unsurprising that her last album, dedicated to Liszt, was given a CHOC by Classica magazine.

Photo: © Nicolas Brodard