Khatia Buniatishvili was born on 21 June 1987 in Batumi, Georgia, and began piano lessons with her mother at the age of three. She played her first concert with the Tbilisi Chamber Orchestra at six and was appearing abroad by the age of ten. She studied in Tbilisi with Tengiz Amirejibi and later in Vienna with Oleg Maisenberg at the University of Music and Performing Arts. Between the ages of eleven and fifteen she also trained intensively with the pedagogue Michel Sogny at the Villa Schindler in Austria. She holds both Georgian and French citizenship, and her elder sister Gvantsa is also a pianist and frequent duo partner.

Buniatishvili signed an exclusive contract with Sony Classical in 2010 and made her debut on the label in 2011 with an all-Liszt recital that included the Sonata in B minor. A succession of solo and concerto albums followed, among them Chopin (2012), Motherland (2014), Kaleidoscope (2016), Schubert (2019) and Labyrinth (2020), together with concerto recordings made with Paavo Järvi and Zubin Mehta. She is a regular guest of the Verbier Festival and of major orchestras across Europe and North America, and is known for a strongly personal, wide-dynamic approach to Romantic repertoire that has drawn both admiration and debate among critics. In December 2024 she was among the artists who performed at the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatia_Buniatishvili