When Does Georgian Music Stop Being “Georgian Music”?

U.S. premiere of Vaja Azarashvili’s Cello Concerto at Merkin Hall in New York, featuring Sandro Sidamonidze as soloist with Orchestra for People and conductor Hahnsol Kim (Photo: Matthew Holler)

Cellist Sandro Sidamonidze on a musical culture across borders – and knowing when the music begins to travel on its
own

There is a peculiar moment that occurs when you perform music from your own country abroad. Before
you play a note, the music has already acquired an adjective.

It is Georgian music.

At home, that adjective can be almost invisible. A concerto is a concerto; a composer belongs to the
musical landscape you grew up with; certain melodies, harmonies and gestures arrive without requiring
footnotes. Abroad, the same piece can suddenly find itself carrying the weight of a country. It becomes a
representative. An introduction is expected. A cultural context has to be supplied.

I have spent much of my adult musical life outside Georgia, and the longer my career has developed
internationally, the more interested I have become in this transformation.

I am proud to be a Georgian cellist. Georgia is inseparable from who I am, musically and personally, and
introducing its music to audiences abroad has become one of the great joys of my life. But I have also
begun to wonder whether the ultimate success of advocating for Georgian classical music would be the
moment when its nationality becomes less important.

When, in other words, does Georgian music get to become simply music?

For me, that question became particularly tangible through Vaja Azarashvili’s Cello Concerto.

A concerto crosses the Atlantic

In November 2025, I walked onto the stage of Merkin Hall in New York to give the United States
premiere of Azarashvili’s concerto.

znThe phrase “United States premiere” sounds grand. For me, however, it also contained something
slightly unsettling.

Azarashvili was not some newly discovered composer whose manuscript had been sitting forgotten in an
archive. He was a major figure in Georgian musical life. I did not approach his music as an
archaeological curiosity. It belonged to the musical environment from which I came.

And yet in New York the concerto was arriving for the first time.

That discrepancy stayed with me.

How can a piece of music possess a meaningful life in one country and effectively have no performance
history in another? What determines which works are allowed to travel?
We sometimes speak about the classical canon as though it were the natural result of quality: great music
survives and crosses borders because it is great. The reality is far less orderly.

        Music travels because somebody carries it.

A performer learns the score. A conductor agrees to programme it. An orchestra takes a chance on
unfamiliar material. A presenter gives it space. A journalist becomes curious. An audience hears it.

Another musician hears about it.

Eventually, if enough of those things happen, a work no longer needs an advocate.

But first somebody has to put it on the stand.

For that New York performance, I felt an unusual combination of roles. I was the soloist, of course, but I
was also introducing a musical voice from the culture in which I had grown up to an audience for whom
that voice was largely unknown.

That creates a responsibility quite different from performing Beethoven.

Nobody asks you to explain why Beethoven matters before you play him.

With unfamiliar Georgian repertoire, the explanation can begin before the music has had the opportunity
to make its own case.

The danger of the adjective 

Calling Azarashvili a Georgian composer is not reductive in itself. He was Georgian. His cultural
surroundings mattered. Georgian musical traditions matter enormously.

The problem begins when “Georgian” becomes a genre.

Once that happens, an audience can begin listening for nationality instead of listening to the individual
composer.

Is this passage Georgian? Is that melody Georgian? Where is the folk influence? What does this tell us
about Georgia?
These can be interesting questions. But imagine approaching every French composer by asking what
each bar tells us about France.

At some point we allow Debussy to be Debussy.

That freedom – to be culturally rooted without being culturally imprisoned – is something I would like
Georgian composers to have internationally as well.

Georgia has an extraordinary musical identity, and its polyphonic vocal tradition is deservedly famous
throughout the world. But Georgian classical composition is not one language. Vaja Azarashvili,
Sulkhan Tsintsadze and Giya Kancheli are not interchangeable representatives of a national style. They
are individual composers with profoundly different musical personalities.

When I perform their music abroad, I therefore find myself negotiating a paradox.

The Georgian context can open the door. But once the door is open, I want the adjective to recede.

I want the audience to encounter the composer.

The music that follows you – and the music that does not 

My relationship with this repertoire is inevitably personal.

I am Georgian, but my professional life has become international. I have spent years performing in the
United States and Europe, and my career has taken me to stages across Europe, America and Asia. Like
many musicians of my generation, my artistic identity was formed in one place while my professional
life developed across many others.

Distance changes the way you understand where you came from.

When you live inside a culture, you do not necessarily think about which parts of it are unusual. They are
simply around you. It is only when you leave that you begin to notice which things travel easily and
which do not.

I discovered that Georgian music did not automatically follow me.

The standard cello repertoire did.

Bach was waiting everywhere. Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff already
belonged to the common language of the concert world. I could arrive in another country and begin a
conversation about them without explaining why the conversation should exist.

With Georgian composers, the situation was different.

Their absence became visible to me precisely because I was no longer in Georgia.

Gradually I began to feel that being a Georgian musician abroad gave me an opportunity – not an
obligation to turn every concert into a Georgian programme, but an opportunity to make certain
introductions.

That distinction is important to me.

I do not want Georgian repertoire to become my musical passport.

I want it to become part of my repertoire.

And I want it to become part of other musicians’ repertoire too.

What happens after somebody listens? 

 This is where my experience has made me enormously optimistic.

Over the years, I have had the privilege of introducing Georgian music to thousands of people who might
otherwise never have encountered it.

At first, I thought primarily about the performance itself: whether the audience responded, whether the
piece communicated, whether I had made a convincing case for music that was new to many of the
people in the room.

Then I began noticing what happened afterwards.

People would approach me after concerts and ask about the music.

Who was that composer? What else did he write? Which other Georgian composers should I listen to?
Where can I hear more?
Those conversations meant a great deal to me. But something even more exciting began happening with
fellow musicians.

They asked for composers’ names. They wanted to know where they could find scores. They bought the
music. They learned it. They performed it.

And some of them kept performing it.

I cannot adequately describe how happy that makes me.

For a performer, applause is immediate and beautiful, but it disappears. You walk off the stage, the hall
empties and the evening becomes a memory.

This is different.

When another musician takes a piece you introduced to them and carries it somewhere you are not going,
the music has acquired another life.

At that point it is no longer dependent on you.

That, to me, is advocacy succeeding.

The second performance 

It has also changed the way I think about premieres.

A premiere is exciting because it marks a crossing. Something has happened that had not happened
before. Giving the United States premiere of Azarashvili’s Cello Concerto at Merkin Hall was deeply
meaningful to me, both as a cellist and as a Georgian musician.

But a premiere can also become a beautifully documented dead end.

There is a photograph. There is a programme. There is a sentence in a biography: “gave the United States
premiere.”
And then nobody plays the piece again.

If that happens, have we actually expanded the repertoire?
I am increasingly convinced that the meaningful question is not whether a work receives its first
performance in a country.

        It is whether it receives its second.

The word first only becomes truly meaningful if something follows it.

The second performance is much less glamorous and perhaps much more important.

The first can happen because of personal advocacy, cultural programming, curiosity or coincidence. A
second performance suggests that the music has begun to detach itself from the circumstances of its
arrival.

A third suggests something more.

Eventually another cellist might encounter Azarashvili’s concerto and decide to learn it without knowing
me, without being Georgian and without needing an anniversary or a Georgian cultural event to justify
the decision.

That would mean far more to me than possessing the premiere as a line in my biography.

Because then the piece would have started travelling by itself.

Tsintsadze without quotation marks 

I feel something similar when I perform the music of Sulkhan Tsintsadze.

Tsintsadze offers an especially interesting example because Georgian musical language can be deeply
present in his work. There are gestures that immediately evoke a particular musical world.

The temptation is therefore to package the music around that difference.

But when I programme Tsintsadze in a recital, I do not want the audience to experience an ethnographic
interlude between the “real” pieces.

I want the musical argument of the programme to continue.

This may sound like a small distinction, but programming creates hierarchies very easily.

There is a difference between saying, “And now, here is an interesting Georgian piece,” and placing that
piece in a programme because it belongs there musically.

Performers communicate their confidence in repertoire partly through the company they allow it to keep.

If I place Tsintsadze beside Beethoven or Schumann, I am not claiming that these composers are
identical or historically equivalent. I am simply refusing to treat one of them as requiring a separate
category of seriousness.

The audience can decide what it thinks of the music.

That is all I want.

And when somebody comes to me afterwards asking where to find the score, something important has
happened. The piece is no longer merely the Georgian work that Sandro played. It has entered somebody
else’s imagination.

I do not want to be the destination 

There is a fashionable idea that musicians are “cultural ambassadors.” I understand why the phrase is
attractive, and there are circumstances in which it is accurate.

But I am not sure I want to spend my artistic life being an ambassador.

An ambassador is always representing somewhere else.

A musician should eventually be able simply to play.

Perhaps the performer’s role in unfamiliar repertoire is closer to building a bridge. At first, the bridge is
conspicuous because without it there is no crossing. You explain the composer. You provide the score.

You talk to the conductor. You persuade a presenter. You find the recording. You tell the story.

Then people begin crossing.

And if the bridge works, eventually they stop thinking about who built it.

I have already been fortunate enough to watch the beginning of that process.

I know that, in my own way, I have introduced thousands of people to music from Georgia. Some have
simply enjoyed it. Some have fallen in love with it. Some have become curious about an entire musical
culture they had scarcely encountered before.

And some have taken the music away with them.

That last part matters most.

I do not want somebody to perform Azarashvili because Sandro Sidamonidze told them they should. I
want them to perform Azarashvili because they heard the music and could not imagine not performing it.

I do not want Tsintsadze to remain attached to my name. I want another cellist to discover a piece, buy
the score, live with it, make completely different interpretive decisions from mine and introduce it to
another audience.

        That is how repertoire becomes repertoire.

It moves from musician to musician until eventually nobody remembers who made the introduction.

When does Georgian music stop being “Georgian music”? 

Perhaps that is also the answer to the question with which I began.

When does Georgian music stop being “Georgian music”?
Not when we erase where it comes from.

I would never want that.

Georgia is present in this music, just as it is present in me. Its history, language and musical traditions
should be understood and celebrated. Part of the privilege of performing this repertoire internationally is
being able to open that door for somebody who may never have encountered Georgian classical culture
before.

But I think something changes when the adjective stops being a condition of entry.

When a musician chooses a Georgian work not because a Georgian programme is required, but because
the piece belongs in the programme.

When an audience does not need to be persuaded that music from a small country deserves its attention.

When somebody hears one Georgian composer and asks for another.

When a musician buys the score.

When one performance creates another performance, and that performance creates another.

Those are among the happiest moments I have experienced as a musician.

When I stood on the stage at Merkin Hall with Azarashvili’s concerto, yes, I was a Georgian cellist
performing a Georgian concerto in New York. Yes, the fact that it was the first American performance
mattered enormously. And yes, I understood that for many people in the hall this music came from a
place they knew relatively little about.

But once I began playing, I wanted all of those facts to become secondary.

There was a cellist.

There was an orchestra.

There was a concerto.

And there was an audience deciding what it heard.

That is the strange destination of cultural advocacy: you begin by asking people to notice where the
music comes from, and you hope eventually to reach a point where the music no longer needs your
introduction.

I think I will know that this work has truly succeeded when, somewhere years from now, a cellist I have
never met walks onto a stage in a country where I have never performed, opens a score by Azarashvili or
Tsintsadze and begins to play.

Perhaps nobody in the audience will know that another Georgian cellist once carried that music across
another border.

Perhaps I will never even hear about the performance.

I think that would make me happiest of all.

Because by then, the music would no longer need me to carry it.

    It would be travelling on its own.

U.S. premiere of Vaja Azarashvili’s Cello Concerto at Merkin Hall in New York, featuring Sandro Sidamonidze as soloist with Orchestra for People and conductor Hahnsol Kim (Photo: Matthew Holler)

Last season, Georgian cellist Sandro Sidamonidze gave the U.S. premiere of the Cello Concerto by Vaja Azarashvili (1936-2024) at Merkin Hall in New York. Sidamonidze’s broader programming also reflects an interest in Georgian voices such as Sulkhan Tsintsadze (1925-1991) and Giya Kancheli (1935-2019), while his career now spans the United States, Europe, and Asia.