VIDEO PODCAST: Women Composers - Our special hour-long illustrated feature on women composers includes contributions from Diana Ambache, Gail Wein, Hilary Tann, Natalie Artemas-Polak and Victoria Bond.
RESOUNDING ECHOES: From August 2022, Robert McCarney's regular series features little-known twentieth century classical composers.
Georgian violinist and conductor Liana Alexandres asuli Isakadze was born in Tbilisi on 2 August 1946. A child prodigy, she was taught by David Oistrakh, becoming his assistant, and she shared with Pavel Kogan first prize at the 1970 Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in Helsinki.
She played as a violin soloist with top European orchestras and then, from 1981, was promoted from concertmaster to conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of Georgia. She created a festival called 'Musicians are Joking' and ran it from 1982 until 1989. She became the youngest ever People's Artist of the USSR in 1988, and in 1990 she moved her chamber orchestra to Ingolstadt in Germany for five years, to open up new performance venues for the group.
From 1995 until 2004 she was artistic director of a new Georgian State Chamber Orchestra. She later formed a Chamber Orchestra of Young Musicians of Southern and Eastern Europe, and also formed the ensemble 'Virtuosi from Facebook' who played at her festivals Friends of Facebook and Night Serenades.
Suffering from dementia in her final years, Liana Isakadze died in Tbilisi on 5 July 2024, aged seventy-seven.