Pianist Valentina Lisitsa had a career before she gathered 50-million-plus YouTube views. Now that she’s a star, Naxos has released a recording she made in 2008 featuring a Golden Age piano programme featuring a Beethoven sonata, some Schumann as well as the work of rivals Sigismond Thalberg and Franz Liszt.
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Lisitsa is such a phenomenon because she is a musical personality. She has technique to burn and a steely determination about how each piece is supposed to sound. So much so that she manages to rob all of the music on this album of spontaneiety.
Making a Beethoven sonata sound spontaneous is about as contrived as making a large 54-year-old operatic soprano into a believable, poor Mimi, dying of tuberculosis. But it can be done.
Where my favourite pianists would make the “Appassionata” Sonata sound a bit dishevelled, dressed in clean but worn, slightly mismatched fabrics, Lisitsa has placed one of the most popular of Beethoven’s piano works in a tight corset bedecked in silk and wool. The head is crowned with a perfectly coiffed mane, without a single hair out of place.
This is formidable playing, but not for everyone.
Robert Schumann’s 13 Kinderszenen are carefully scrubbed and not allowed to play outside the fenced area behind the house.
You get the picture. And I happily concede that there are many people who will find this sort of playing hugely satisfying.
The album ends with two showpieces. The first is a not-often-heard fantasy on musical themes from Rossini’s Barber of Seville by Sigismond Thalberg who, in the day, was as much a pianistic rock star as Franz Liszt. The short, 9-minute piece is a great vehicle to show off a virtuoso pianist’s stuff — but not like the ferocious Totentanz by Liszt that is like a week’s worth of hot yoga rolled into 15 minutes.
It is big, impressive and, in a feat that likely neither Liszt not Thalberg would have managed, dispatched by Lisitsa-the-powerhouse without a single wrong note.
You can find all the details here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- 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
