Valentina Lisitsa

Valentina Yevhenivna Lisitsa (born 1973) is a Ukrainian and Russian classical concert pianist. Lisitsa independently launched her career on social media, without initially signing with a tour promoter or record company. By 2012, Lisitsa was among the most frequently viewed pianists on YouTube. The Toronto Symphony canceled her 2015 engagements as a soloist with them because of her social media postings in support of pro-Russian separatists during the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Life and career

Lisitsa was born in Kiev, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Kyiv, Ukraine). Her mother, also named Valentina, is a seamstress and her father, Evgeny, was an engineer.

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

Lisitsa attended the Lysenko music school and, later, the Kyiv Conservatory, where she and her future husband, Alexei Kuznetsoff, studied under Dr. Ludmilla Tsvierko. When Lisitsa met Kuznetsoff, she began to take music more seriously. In 1991, they won the first prize in The Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition in Miami, Florida.

In 2010, Lisitsa told an interviewer, she and her husband put their life savings into recording a CD of Rachmaninoff concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra, in hopes of furthering her career. Lisitsa signed a three-year contract with French record label Naïve in 2021. . She has posted online recitals and practicing streams. She has also collaborated with violinist Hilary Hahn in recital engagements.

On May 9, 2022 Lisitsa played a concert in Mariupol in commemoration of its annexation by Russia.

Twitter controversy

In April 2015, a number of scheduled performances at Toronto Symphony Orchestra were canceled due to "provocative" posts that Lisitsa posted on her Twitter account; the orchestra initially did not specify which remarks led to this decision. Lisitsa said that the orchestra threatened her if she spoke about the cancellation. The CEO of Toronto Symphony later provided a seven-page compilation of her tweets that prompted the decision and said that it was "not a free speech issue, but rather an issue of someone practicing very intolerant and offensive expression through Twitter".

The Toronto Star criticised the orchestra's decision in an editorial, writing 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." The Ukrainian Weekly has described her postings as "hate speech." In 2022, Benjamin Ivry wrote in International Piano Magazine that Lisitsa had "parrot[ted] Putin’s propagandistic talking points about Ukraine".

Discography Lisitsa has recorded for the Audiofon, CiscoMusic, and VAI labels.

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.