Born in the year 2000, Giorgi Gigashvili played piano from early on, but did not originally plan to embark on a professional career in classical music. He loved to arrange and sing folk songs and pop music of Georgia, his home country, leading to several First Prizes at song competitions in Tbilisi, his native city. During the recent Corona lockdown period, Gigashvili composed electronic music that is extremely popular in his home country. But before then, he had experienced a couple of major turning points in his life. In April 2019 he won First Prize at Vigo International Piano Competition with Martha Argerich as head of the jury, an artist whom he much admires. Just a few months later, he garnered Third Prize and the Audience Prize at the Busoni Piano Competition. Then, in 2021, he won First Prize at the Bad Kissingen KlavierOlymp competition, and there, once again, he also took away the Audience Prize. These are as many reasons to make us curious to hear his début performance at the Ruhr Piano Festival. Indeed, the jury in Bad Kissingen was not only full of praise for Gigashvili’s “individual, highly musical interpretations that display profound awareness of structure,” but also for his “natural stage presence”.