There are albums that feel like carefully curated visiting cards, and then there are those that arrive as a statement of existence. With All My Breath and All My Blood, released by Alpha Classics, belongs decisively to the second category. It is a recording that behaves less like a recital and more like a confrontation — with history, with the instrument, with the accumulated mythology of Sergei Prokofiev’s so-called “War Sonatas,” and, quietly but insistently, with the political and emotional pressure lines of contemporary Georgia.
For Giorgi Gigashvili, this is his second solo album, though the word solo is slightly misleading. Even when alone at the keyboard, he sounds accompanied by ghosts: the twentieth century’s industrial violence, Soviet coercion, and the private rage of a composer who knew how to encode brutality into rhythm. Gigashvili has lived with Prokofiev for a decade, and the familiarity shows — though never as comfort. What emerges instead is a sense of prolonged physical engagement, a pianist who approaches the instrument less as a lyrical vehicle and more as a resistant body.
The three sonatas — Nos. 6, 7, and 8 — have been overexposed by virtuosity culture, routinely treated as athletic benchmarks. Gigashvili declines that tradition. His readings avoid sleek aggression or metronomic brutality. Instead, he cultivates friction. In Sonata No. 6, the Allegro moderato unfolds with a deliberately unstable gait, phrases articulated as if the ground beneath them might shift. The infamous motoric drive never quite locks into place; it threatens, hesitates, surges again. This uncertainty becomes expressive — a refusal to aestheticize violence into efficiency.
Sonata No. 7, the most frequently weaponized of the three, reveals Gigashvili’s particular intelligence. The Andante caloroso, often sentimentalized, here carries a strange, exhausted warmth, like a memory replayed after too many retellings. And when the Precipitato arrives, it does not explode; it accelerates with grim inevitability. The hammering is less triumphant than compulsive, suggesting not victory but entrapment — history repeating itself because it has not learned how to stop.
The Eighth Sonata, expansive and deceptively lyrical, becomes the album’s emotional center. Gigashvili resists any temptation to smooth its contradictions. The long first movement breathes with a tense, almost suspicious lyricism; beauty is allowed, though never trusted. In the final Vivace, brilliance flashes through layers of irony, reminding us that Prokofiev’s wit is inseparable from cruelty. This is playing that understands irony as an ethical stance.
The album’s title — With All My Breath and All My Blood — risks sounding like marketing hyperbole, yet the performances justify its extremity. Gigashvili has spoken openly about pouring personal rage into this music, shaped by Georgia’s recent history. Crucially, that rage is never presented as confession. It is metabolized into structure, tempo, articulation. The result feels closer to reportage than diary — a quality that aligns the album surprisingly well with the sensibility of a New Yorker essay: personal without being self-indulgent, political without being declarative.
The second half of the disc introduces a change of texture through collaboration with Lisa Batiashvili, Gigashvili’s compatriot and long-time artistic ally. Their transcription of the “Dance of the Knights” from Romeo and Juliet avoids orchestral bombast. Instead, it sharpens the music’s authoritarian pulse, stripping it down to its skeletal menace. The piano becomes percussive architecture; the violin, a blade cutting through mass.
Most telling, however, is the inclusion of To Giya, P.S. by Josef Bardanashvili, written especially for this duo. Dedicated to Giya Kancheli, the piece functions as a quiet epilogue — brief, restrained, and weighted with cultural memory. After Prokofiev’s clenched fists, Bardanashvili offers something closer to a scar: understated, sensitive, unresolved. It situates the album firmly within a Georgian musical lineage that values ethical gravity over spectacle.
Alpha Classics deserves credit for allowing this album to breathe. The sound is close, tactile, unvarnished. You hear the resistance of the keys, the density of attacks, the micro-hesitations that carry meaning.
Nothing is upholstered. Nothing is explained.
With All My Breath and All My Blood ultimately refuses the comfort of heroic narrative. It proposes a different model of virtuosity — one rooted in endurance, moral tension, and an almost journalistic attentiveness to sound as evidence. Gigashvili does not redeem Prokofiev; he exposes him. And in doing so, he exposes something of our present moment as well: a world in which violence keeps returning in new guises, and art’s task is to remember, articulate, and withstand.
By Ivan Nechaev
