By the time the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic musicians walked into Tatuza Jazz Club on December 17, Tbilisi had already done its part. The room was humming in that particular Georgian way—half-conversation, half-expectation, a collective understanding that something mildly improper was about to happen. Classical musicians in a jazz club. Spoken poetry threading through Shostakovich. A Tuesday evening behaving like a minor cultural incident.
Tatuza is not a place that encourages reverence. It encourages proximity. The chairs sit too close, the ceiling presses gently downward, and the audience listens with its shoulders, not just its ears. This is useful. Chamber music likes this kind of pressure. It straightens its posture.
The trio from the Karajan Academy—violinist Harry Frederick Keller Ward, cellist Beata Antikainen, pianist Noora Tuulia Ylönen—played as people who understand that virtuosity is a private matter. Ward’s violin carried a nervous elegance, the sound of someone thinking in real time. Antikainen’s cello spoke in longer sentences, physical and grounded. Ylönen, seated at the piano with Nordic composure, controlled the evening’s oxygen supply, opening and closing harmonic windows with surgical calm.
At the center of the evening stood Nino Kasradze. She did not frame the concert. She entered it. Georgian texts in her voice carried weight, rhythm, density. Georgian, in a small room, behaves like a percussion instrument. Consonants land. Vowels stretch. Kasradze did not declaim; she calibrated. Her voice slipped into the music the way smoke enters a room—slowly, decisively, impossible to ignore. Shostakovich’s early Piano Trio, already anxious and over-aware, seemed to tense up in recognition. The music listened back.
This is the advantage of mixing disciplines in a city that distrusts polite boundaries. Poetry here is never decorative; it arrives carrying history, irony, exhaustion, defiance. When Kasradze moved through texts by Paata Shamugia, Terenti Graneli, Paolo Iashvili, Zviad Ratiani, Titsian Tabidze, the words landed with the authority of lived experience. The trio absorbed this pressure gracefully. Nobody rushed. Nobody smoothed anything over.
Wolfgang Rihm’s Fremde Szenen III appeared like a series of nervous thoughts written in sound. Fragmented, volatile, allergic to resolution. Kasradze’s spoken passages felt at home here. This was language and music recognizing each other as slightly unstable companions. The audience followed willingly. Silence grew attentive.
The Silvestrov Bagatelles, delivered by Ylönen with an almost suspicious tenderness, acted as emotional palate cleansers that refused to cleanse anything. These were moments where time loosened its grip. The room leaned in.
By the time Schumann’s Piano Trio in D minor arrived, the evening had already trained its listeners. Schumann sounded exposed, diaristic, intensely present. The Karajan Academy musicians played with confidence that avoided exhibitionism. Energy circulated. The jazz club held it all together, like a good editor who knows when to intervene and when to disappear.
Later that night, Rob Clearfield took the same stage with his quartet, and the room nodded in recognition. His music speaks fluent thought. Jazz here functioned as a continuation of the evening’s logic: form-aware, alert, conversational. Clearfield plays like someone assembling architecture in real time, leaving visible joints and open spaces. He will be back in Tbilisi repeatedly over the coming month, which feels appropriate. Some conversations deserve more than one night.
Behind the evening stood David Sakvarelidze, whose curatorial presence remains unmistakable. Evenings like this one exist because someone insists they should. These concerts happen through a particular kind of cultural insistence: patient, intelligent, resistant to institutional fatigue. Sakvarelidze operates within academic music as a force of alignment, connecting musicians, spaces, and ideas that usually remain separated by habit. He understands that repertoire alone never creates an event; context does.
What lingered after the sound faded was a sensation of alignment. European chamber discipline, Georgian language, contemporary jazz thinking—each element retained its identity while participating in a shared logic of listening. No synthesis was declared. None was necessary. On a December night in Tbilisi, a jazz club briefly behaved like a cultural laboratory. The experiment succeeded quietly. The audience noticed. That was enough.
Review by Ivan Nechaev
