Vakhtang Kakhidze
Conductor

Vakhtang Kakhidze was born into a family of musicians in 1959 in Tbilisi, Georgia He began to study music when he was 6 years old, as a pianist. In 1975 he finished choir conducting department of Music High School. In 1981 he graduated from Moscow State Conservatory as a composer, and in 1983 he finished the post graduate courses of the same institute. His teachers were such famous musicians as Nikolai Sidelnikov – composition, Edison Denisov – art of instrumentation and others. In 1988-89 he studied conducting with his father, world famous Georgian conductor Djansug Kakhidze.
In 1989, Vakhtang Kakhidze has begun his activity as a conductor. His debut took place in Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre, where he has conducted several performances of his ballet “Amazons”. From 1993 he worked as conductor of Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra. Beside concert performances he recorded 25 CDs for famous international sound-recording companies.
In 2002 Vakhtang Kakhidze was appointed a chief conductor of Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Director of Djansug Kakhidze Tbilisi Centre for Music & Culture. Also, he leads annual International Music Festival “Autumn Tbilisi”, which hosts famous musicians all over the world.
In 2004 he had concert tour with Tbilisi Symphony orchestra in Russia and Italy performing in such leading concert halls as Moscow Conservatory Big Hall and St. Petersburg Philharmony, Milan Conservatory Verdi Concert Hall, Santa Cecilia Music Academy new concert hall in Rome, Merano, Bari and other cities.
Vakhtang Kakhidze performed with such well-known music ensembles as: Prague Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra “New Russia” (artistic director Y. Bashmet), Beijing Symphony Orchestra, Kiev Symphony Orchestra, Paris Trinity Church Choir and Orchestra, Israel Chamber Orchestra, The Israel Camerata (Jerusalem), Ensemble del Arte (Germany), chamber orchestras “Moscow Soloists” and “Kremerata Baltica”.
Vakhtang Kakhidze collaborates with such outstanding musicians as Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet, Viktor Tretjakov, Natalia Gutman, Alexander Kniazev, Michel Legrand, Didie Lockwood, Jan Garbarek, Gary Hoffman, Michel Lethiec, Llisa Batiashvili, Francois Leleux, Eliso Virsaladze, Liana Isakadze, Alexander Toradze, Alexander Korsantia, Jose Carreras, Lado Ataneli, Iano Tamar, Zurab sotkilava, Nino Surguladze, Nino Machidze and many others.
As composer Vakhtang Kakhidze works in different musical genres. His pieces are performed in Moscow, Petersburg, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary, Finland, UK, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Turkey, Israel, India, the USA and Japan. He is an author of soundtracks for films and drama performances, several jazz compositions and pop songs.

Olga Scheps
Piano

Olga Scheps was born in a Jewish Family in Moskau, Russia in 1986, both of her parents wore born in the Ukraine. Since 1992 Olga lives with her Family in Germany.

She began studying the piano more intensively after her family moved to Germany in 1992. At an early age she had already developed her own unique style of keyboard playing, which combines intense emotiveness and powerful expressivity with extraordinary pianistic technique. Among those who discovered these talents was Alfred Brendel, who has encouraged the young pianist. A holder of scholarships from the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben and Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, she completed her studies with Professor Pavel Gililov in her adopted home of Cologne in 2013, passing her concert examination with distinction. She rounded out her training with Professor Arie Vardi and Professor Dmitri Bashkirov.

Besides the well-known works for piano, Olga Scheps’s repertory consists of compositions that are rarely heard in the concert hall, including the posthumous Études of Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt’s Malédiction, Olivier Messiaen’s Les Oiseaux exotiques, Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Concerto, Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate, and Mieczysław Weinberg’s Piano Quintet.

Her solo recitals are as popular with audiences all over the world as her acclaimed appearances as a soloist with orchestra and her chamber projects.

Such noted conductors as Thomas Dausgaard, Lorin Maazel, José Serebrier, Marcus Bosch, Ralf Weikert, Michel Tabachnik, Antoni Wit, Ivor Bolton, Cristian Mandeal, Christoph Altstaedt, Tugan Sokhiev, Simone Young, Markus Poschner, and Pablo Heras-Casado have invited Olga Scheps to collaborate with them.

Among the leading orchestras with which she has appeared in concert are the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg, the Munich Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the State Symphony Cappella of Russia (Moscow), the Staatskapelle Weimar, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the NDR Radiophilharmonie, the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, the Prague Philharmonia, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, the Braunschweig State Orchestra, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra and the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla.

Olga Scheps now performs with great success in world-famous concert halls such as the Elbphilharmonie, the Berlin and Cologne Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Cadogan Hall London, the Zurich Tonhalle, and the Suntory Hall Tokyo. She is a sought-after guest at festivals like the Rheingau Musik Festival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Kissinger Sommer, Heidelberger Frühling, Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, MDR Musiksommer, Lucerne Festival am Piano, ACHTBRÜCKEN Festival in Cologne, Mozart Festival Würzburg, Mersin Festival in Turkey, and Menuhin Festival Gstaad.

A passionate chamber musician, she plays regularly with such artists as Alban Gerhardt, Daniel Hope, Adrian Brendel, Jan Vogler, Nils Mönkemeyer, the Danish String Quartet, the Danel Quartet and the Kuss Quartet, with which she recorded Mieczysław Weinberg’s Piano Quintet.

Since 2009 Olga Scheps has been an exclusive Sony Classical artist. Her debut album Chopin immediately won an ECHO Klassik award. The two recordings that followed, Russian Album (2010) and Schubert (2012), were also highly praised by the press. Her fourth Sony Classical CD was released early in 2014 and features Chopin’s Piano Concertos nos. 1 and 2 with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. The success of her solo-album Vocalise, published in 2015, was surpassed by her latest album Satie which Olga Scheps has recorded on the occasion of the French composer’s 150th birthday: It reached top 1 of the German classical music charts at first go. Her CD Tchaikovsky was released in October 2017, and she broke new ground with the album 100 % Scooter – Piano Only, on which she recorded arrangements of the most famous Scooter hits by Sven Helbig. In 2019, Olga Scheps’ album Melody featured repertoire ranging from Bach to Aphex Twin, tracing an arc across four centuries. A further release features her together with the Kuss Quartet performing the Weinberg Piano Quintet. On her 2021 album Family she combines works from the established classical canon with new piano arrangements of highly popular melodies and soundtracks as well as world premiere recordings of compositions by Schiller, Chilly Gonzales and by herself.

David Garrett
Violin

Having picked up his first violin at age 4, DAVID GARRETT studied with Zahkar Bron and Ida Haendel to name a view.

His extraordinary, multifaceted talent was spotted early on: as a child prodigy, DAVID GARRETT made his stage debut at the age of 10 and became the youngest-ever artist to sign with the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon at the age of 13. As a child he worked with conductors legends like Zubin Mehta, Claudio Abbado and Yehudi Menuhin. At the age of merely 15 he recorded all 24 of Paganini’s Caprices – doubtlessly some of the most challenging pieces ever written for violin. Yehudi Menuhin has even praised him as “the greatest violinist of his generation”.

At this very point of his career, he opted for honing and broadening his skills, enrolling at the world-famous Juilliard School in New York: he become a student of Itzhak Perlman.

After his graduation and continuing to this day DAVID GARRETT has been working with the most exceptional conductors in the classical field such as Zubin Mehta, Christoph Eschenbach, Riccardo Chailly, and Andrés Orozco-Estrada.

Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra