![]() ![]() In mid-2019, a video of her performance of the finale of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. Lang Lang is a bit too saucy for Liszt in my opinion, I much prefer Valentina Lisitsas renditions of Liszt, personally. In 2019, Lisitsa recorded the complete piano music of Tchaikovsky for Decca. Although for a piece like La Campanella, hearing a world renowned pianist like Evgeny, Lang-Lang, or Valentina play it, you realize theres an even higher tier of musical talent. Lisitsa has appeared at top venues including Carnegie Hall and the Royal Albert Hall, but she faced controversy in 2015 as her appearance with the Toronto Symphony was cancelled due to provocative tweets supporting the Russian-backed insurgency in Ukraine (Lisitsa herself is of Russian and Polish ethnic background). Most of her recordings have focused on Romantic and Russian repertory, but she also issued a recital of music by Philip Glass in 2015. Decca issued her Rachmaninov recordings singly, and she has continued to record for Decca at least yearly. By 2012, with Lisitsa's online views mounting toward the 50 million mark, she was booked at London's Royal Albert Hall and signed to the Decca label. This required the investment of their entire life savings, but it paid off. They self-financed a recording of the four Rachmaninov piano concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2010, Lisitsa and Kuznetsoff executed the next step in their plan. She issued a solo recital of works by Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, and Sigismond Thalberg on Naxos in 2010, and accompanied Hahn on an Ives sonata recording for Deutsche Grammophon the following year. and Europe as an accompanist to violinist Hilary Hahn. Her videos did both: in the late 2000s decade she toured the U.S. Lisitsa hoped that internet stardom would propel her to success in conventional channels of touring and major-label recordings. She posted a video on the internet in 2007 and found immediate success in that medium, topping charts in early metrics. However, Lisitsa's career stalled, and she became interested in the possibilities of new media for promoting classical music. They had some success in the U.S., appearing at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York in 1995 and making recordings, both as a duo and by Lisitsa as a soloist, on the Audiofon label in the late 1990s. ![]() They won the Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition in Miami in 1991 and moved to the U.S., settling in North Carolina. There she met pianist Alexei Kuznetsoff, and the pair began performing as duo pianists. Lisitsa attended the Lysenko School of Music in Kiev and then enrolled at the Kiev Conservatory, studying with Ludmilla Tsvierko. She took up the piano at three and was giving concerts within a year, but for a time she hoped to become a professional chess player. Lisitsa was born in Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, on March 25, 1973. Her strategy was successful: in the 2010s decade she was signed to the major label Decca and has been a fixture in its stable of artists. And she brought a Debussyan delicacy to the opening of its companion prelude in G major: this was jeu perl at its best.Pianist Valentina Lisitsa was among the first classical musicians to use an internet video service as a significant method of promoting her career. ![]() Her arresting image of "a mighty fountain suddenly starved of water" was oddly apposite for the desolate Prelude in B minor Op 32 No 10: she let the bare chords breathe and expand, and built to a massive climactic sound. And as she launched into the Rachmaninov Etude-Tableau, nicknamed "Little Red Riding Hood", her horror-film scenario was vividly bodied forth in two minutes of gripping music. Musicians who free-associate in their programme notes, rather than giving sober background facts are usually a bit weird, but Lisitsa's literary thoughts were a bold attempt to get inside our heads before she'd played a note. This had less to do with the fact that the works she played were of that era or that the centrepiece was a dazzling fantasia by that salon supremo Sigismund Thalberg than with the way she presented these works. Publicity for the Ukrainian pianist Valentina Lisitsa may parade her presence on MySpace and YouTube, but everything about her Wigmore Hall recital suggested that the 19th century is her natural habitat. In the piano etude La Campanella (The Little Bell) by Franz Liszt, we are actually dealing with two masters of their craft: At the center, in fact, is a musical theme that originated with the virtuoso devil violinist Niccol Paganini, but was transferred to the piano by Liszt.
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