The name of the outstanding pianist Eliso Versaladze is known and highly appreciated worldwide. She was a student of Yakov Zak and Heinrich Neuhaus, a laureate of the Second International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1962, and an absolute winner of the Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau, Germany, in 1966. Her interpretations of the great German romantic composer's works became brilliant examples, and in 1976, again in Zwickau, she was awarded a special Shumann prize.
Versaladze's playing conquers with its sincerity, extraordinary spirituality and emotionality. The audience mesmerized with her performance would forget about a breathtaking technical difficulty only to enjoy the clarity of sound and the richest palette of timbres of her own devise rediscovering the compositions they knew before. Her immaculate style, fine technique, talent and uncommon spiritual aristocratism were the elements, which made her art inimitable in its individuality and extraordinary power of influence.
Svyatoslav Richter was so admired with Versaladze's performance that he wrote, "She's an artist of a great scale… the most powerful female pianist of her time…"
Compositions by Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann were among the pieces most frequetly performed by the pianist in concerts. These greatests representatives of romatism and prominent performers were among the most revered and successfully played authors to Versaladze. This album features some of the great composers' brightest pieces. They are Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11, and Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 as they were unforgettibly performed by Eliso Versaladze at the Big Hall of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory on 11 March, 1977.
