Pianist Khatia Buniatishvili
Releases New Album Featuring Brahms and Schumann
Out January 15, 2027 on Sony Classical
New Single by Robert Schumann
Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17: III. Langsam getragen. Durchweg leise zu halten
Out Today - Listen Here
For her eleventh album on Sony Classical, pianist Khatia Buniatishvili takes on the most elaborate concerto of the nineteenth-century and Robert Schumann’s declaration of love for solo piano. The campaign launches on today, November 6, 2026 with the first single, Schumann’s Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17: III. Langsam getragen. Durchweg leise zu halten, ahead of the full album release on January 15, 2027. Pre-order is available now.
Known for her bold, personal and emotionally charged performances of Brahms’s music, Khatia Buniatishvili has now recorded the composer’s magisterial Piano Concerto No 2 for Sony Classical alongside Schumann’s Fantasie for solo piano – music that has been with the Georgian pianist since her first year at conservatory.
The new recording extends the pianist’s discography with Sony beyond 10 discs and returns her to a large-scale orchestral concerto on record for the first time since her acclaimed recording of Rachmaninoff concertos for the label in 2017.
The second of Brahms’s piano concertos is like no other work in the genre, setting up a profound dialogue between piano and orchestra that pianists liken to chamber music on the largest of scales.
Buniatishvili has long brought her own special qualities and personal imprint to what she describes as the piece’s ‘long, complex, contradictory, and intertwined phrases,’ balancing its delicate structures with her own emotional truthfulness and exposing a rare loneliness in the music.
The nature of the concerto also requires solo spots from members of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, conducted in this recording by Christoph Eschenbach who brings decades of experience in the central European repertoire to the work, and who played it as a pianist. Eschenbach recalls the collaboration with particular warmth:“Recording Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with Khatia Buniatishvili was an immense joy for me. I was deeply moved by her passionate musicianship, the depth and extraordinary range of colours she displayed in the music, and the touching intimacy of her magnificent playing. Together with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, a musical dialogue unfolded, filled with intensity and mutual inspiration. It is a collaboration I look back on with tremendous warmth of feeling.”
Buniatishvili herself is a seasoned but highly individual interpreter of Brahms’s music whose work with the composer has included lauded performances in recital of his testing Piano Sonata No 3.
Alongside Brahms on the album is music by Robert Schumann, the composer who became Brahms’s mentor. Buniatishvili has built a formidable reputation in Schumann performances. Her recording demonstrates her singular ability to capture something of the composer’s romantic free-spiritedness while her formidable technique makes no sacrifices against the text.
The pianist has described how she ‘fell completely in love’ with Schumann’s Fantasie in C major, a work in which the composer enshrined his love for his wife, the virtuoso pianist and composer Clara. At first, Buniatishvili played the work on pure romantic instinct, before stepping back to study and rediscover the piece and better access its depth and meaning.
Khatia Buniatishvili is one of the defining classical musicians of our time, an artist who seeks the truth of the musical moment above notions of perfection and a pianist with an almost unequalled delicacy of touch and a film-director’s ear for storytelling.
She signed to Sony Classical in 2010 and has now released eleven albums on the label – including the concept albums Motherland and Labyrinth – all of which have ignited conversations on interpretation, presentation and repertoire and many of which have received accolades including ECHO Klassik awards.
After strong statements in the music of Liszt, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Chopin and most recently Mozart concertos with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Buniatishvili is well placed to put her formidable pianism and fearless musical imagination in the service of Brahms as his most poignant and Schumann at his most rhapsodic.