Valentina Lisitsa

Valentina Lisitsa at the piano

Lisitsa was born in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine). Her mother, also named Valentina, is a seamstress and her father, Evgeny, was an engineer.[3] Her older brother Eugene died in 2009.[2][3]

She started playing the piano at the age of three, performing her first solo recital at the age of four.[7] She is of Russian and Polish descent on her mother's side, while her father is of Ukrainian heritage.[5][8]

Lisitsa attended the Lysenko music school and, later, the Kyiv Conservatory,[9] where she and her future husband, Alexei Kuznetsoff, studied under Dr. Ludmilla Tsvierko.[10] When Lisitsa met Kuznetsoff, she began to take music more seriously.[11] In 1991, they won the first prize in The Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition in Miami, Florida.[9][12] That same year, they moved to the United States to further their careers as concert pianists.[3] In 1992, the couple married.[3] Their New York debut was at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in 1995.[10]

Lisitsa posted her first YouTube video in 2007. Her set of Chopin etudes reached the number-one slot on Amazon's list of classical video recordings, and became the most-viewed online collection of Chopin etudes on YouTube.[13][14]

To advance her career, in 2010 Lisitsa and her husband put their life savings into recording a CD of Rachmaninoff concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra.[3] In the spring of 2012, before her Royal Albert Hall debut, Lisitsa signed with Decca Records, who later released her Rachmaninoff CD set.[3]

By mid-2012, she had logged nearly 50 million views of her YouTube videos.[4] By mid-2020, her videos reached 200 million views. Her YouTube channel had over 650,000 followers in early 2022.[15]

Lisitsa has performed in various venues around the world, including Carnegie Hall, David Geffen Hall, Benaroya Hall, Musikverein and the Royal Albert Hall. She is well known for her online recitals and practicing streams. She has also collaborated with violinist Hilary Hahn at various recital engagements.[9]

Lisitsa signed a three-year contract with French record label Naïve in 2021. Her first recording with Naïve was a collection of Scriabin’s preludes and shorter works, which was released for streaming and download in late 2021.[15]

Lisitsa has expressed her opposition to what she considered Western interference within Ukraine.[6] In April 2015, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra cancelled concerts with Lisitsa, citing her "provocative" online remarks on her Twitter account; the orchestra initially did not specify which tweets or other commentary it believed crossed a line.[16][17] The CEO of Toronto Symphony provided a PDF document of seven pages listing the most "offensive" tweets. He alleged that the document would "help people understand why we made this decision, and understand as well how this is not a free speech issue, but rather an issue of someone practicing very intolerant and offensive expression through Twitter."[18]

In response, the Toronto Star criticized the orchestra's decision in an editorial, noting that, "Lisitsa was not invited to Toronto to discuss her provocative political views. She was scheduled to play the piano. And second, banning a musician for expressing "'opinions that some believe to be offensive' shows an utter failure to grasp the concept of free speech."[19] Lisitsa said that the orchestra threatened her if she spoke about the cancellation.[20]

The Ukrainian Weekly has described her postings as "hate speech."[5][16] In response, she commented that "satire and hyperbole [are] the best literary tools to combat the lies".[5][16][21]

Lisitsa has recorded six CDs for Audiofon Records, including three solo CDs and two discs of duets with her husband Alexei Kuznetsoff; a Gold CD for CiscoMusic label with cellist DeRosa; a duet recital on VAI label with violinist Ida Haendel; and DVDs of Frédéric Chopin's 24 Études and Schubert-Liszt Schwanengesang.[22]

Her recording of the four sonatas for violin and piano by composer Charles Ives, made with Hilary Hahn, was released in October 2011 on Deutsche Grammophon label. Her album Valentina Lisitsa Live at the Royal Albert Hall (based on her debut performance at that venue 19 June 2012) was released 2 July 2012.

Lisitsa has recorded several compositions by various artists, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Decca Records released her complete album of Rachmaninoff concertos in October 2012.[23] An album of Liszt works was released in October 2013 on Decca label in 2 formats – CD and 12" LP which was cut unedited from analog tape. An even more recent album comprises a number of works of the composer and pianist Philip Glass.[24] As of July 2019, her latest release on Decca records is a 10-CD set titled Tchaikovsky: The Complete Solo Piano Works.

Since September 2019, Lisitsa, as a part of her QOR (Queen of Rachmaninoff) label with her husband Alexei Kuznetsoff, has released the following recordings online:

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Valentina Lisitsa

• Valentina Lisitsa's website
• Valentina Lisitsa's videos on YouTube
• Official Facebook page
• Her official Twitter page, one that was the source of the controversy
• Review of Valentina Lisitsa's 30 September 2010 recital at George Fox University
• Valentina Lisitsa and Alexei Kuznetsoff