It’s tempting to poo-poo Valentina Lisitsa, whose YouTube videos have received somewhere near 50 million views, as a publicity-seeking dilettante. But rather than a lightweight, she is a classical pianist as old-school serious as a meeting of the Soviet Politburo.
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The real proof of Lisitsa’s pianistic pudding will come in live performance, which Torontonians get at Koerner Hall on Sunday afternoon.
Her programme is both orthodox and adventurous: a contemplative Bach chorale, as arranged by Ferrucio Busoni, Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, five Liszt transcriptions of Schubert Lieder, eight Chopin Nocturnes and, to close, Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 7.
“I don’t try to build something chronological or something that’s easy for the programme notes writer,” says Lisitsa from her North Carolina home. It’s her first day back from two months of touring.
“I like to have an emotional progression,” she continues. “I am not there to entertain people but to make them suffer.”
Lisitsa allows a silent pause, then bursts into laughter to soften the impact of what she has just said. But she means it; she wants her listeners to go on an emotional journey that may tear at the soul. It’s like theatre or opera or a good novel.
“I get really annoyed when people applaud after a tragic piece of music,” the pianist says. “I don’t like to be distracted from musicmaking, so I try to structure the pieces on the programme so that they follow each other with little break.”
The second half of her recital opens with the Chopin Nocturnes, which she describes as a reverie that gets shattered by the Prokofiev sonata.
“Emotionally, this is the same as life,” Lisitsa explains. “People never know what is going to strike them. Everything is going well and then comes something bad, completely unexpected.”
Written during World War II, Sonata No. 7 is the second, shortest and most popular of Prokofiev’s three “War Sonatas.” It ends in a fiery frenzy that, in the right hands, sounds almost like unbridled joy.
“If this is joy, it’s the joy of getting revenge on your enemies. It’s the joy of killing; it’s a tank attack,” says the pianist.
There’s an unvarnished quality to Lisitsa’s explanation, but she is merely putting into words what any musician is supposed to say through their instrument. One can’t afford to be polite or to equivocate. There’s nothing like a good slap in the face to get an audience’s attention.
I ask Lisitsa how such a very serious artist ended up using YouTube — the domain of mashups, gags and bad do-it-yourself videos — to get ahead.
“It came out of desperation,” she declares flatly.
“I had come to a dead-end with my agent. I had no recording contract. I had no audience. I had become a commodity,” Lisitsa recalls. “I was just another young, attractive, blond Russian pianist. Just like merchandise at Wal-Mart — all the same.”
But the Ukraine-born graduate of the Kiev Conservatory — who turns 43 next week — hasn’t used the Internet in the obvious ways. For example, she has streamed her home work time on live video. She named her daily practice webcam on UStream the Valentina Lisitsa Show and would sit for 12 hours every day, showing the tedious nuts and bolts of learning and honing music in real time.
She says she has had as many as 1,000 viewers from around the world following her labours at any given moment. She uses her break time to answer questions from these viewers on the site’s comments section or via Twitter.
Lisitsa likes how this demistifies her craft. “So many piano students listen to a beautiful CD and confuse it for the real thing,” she says of the much messier reality of wrong notes and musical phrases that don’t quite make it to their intended destination or shape.
She was able to practice Beethoven’s “Appassionata” using a facsimile of the composer’s original manuscript, adding an extra layer of interest for everyone involved.
The pianist is careful to point out that the webcam is for work, not her personal life, which is strictly private.
I suggest to her that there can often be as much change in the observed as in the observer in experiments like this.
She agrees, pointing out that the camera made her practice more efficiently. The pianist describes the result of being watched as, “Not like an animal in a cage, but like seeing animals on safari, supposedly in their natural environment.”
Lisitsa has also posted YouTube clips of finished pieces as well as teasers for her new albums, which are being released by Decca in the wake of her online success. She describes her deal with the label as, “a match made in heaven.” They’re letting her do what she wants — and are using Lisitsa as a way to try their own experiments online.
For example, Lisitsa’s latest recording, of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3, released yesterday solely online, at a low price — “so low that it’s not worth stealing,” adds the pianist, who loves this new musical democracy.
“People write to me from Iran or a tiny village in Amazonia to thank me for the music,” she says. “How wonderful is that?”
It’s not because she has somehow made the music more fun or trivialized the long, hard, solitary hours of work that make it happen.
“For me, music is not about entertainment,” Lisitsa declares. “When I first came to North America, I was shocked that classical music was included in entertainment sections in the newspapers. I don’t want to be entertainment.”
So, Toronto, prepare to not be entertained on Sunday.
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For all the details on Lisitsa’s recital, click here.
For more on Lisitsa, you can visit her Decca page here, and her own website here.
Here is Lisitsa’s strangely denuded solo recording of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 — posted the results on YouTube yesterday (check out the many videos on her channel here):
John Terauds
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- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
