![]() ![]() I came to Donetsk from Berlin, then will fly to Canada, but my family and my people are on this land.ĪK & DS – Back in the 90s it was noticed that, despite all the ‘freedom of speech’, there is a secret switch in the West. If anything, I have a home here and I can always come back. I feel how they need music I do not think how much is dangerous here and how the West will look at me. Everything was tried to be taken away from them, with blood. Here are our roots, our civilisation to which the people, who are listening to me here, belong to. In Donetsk I play Prokofiev, he was born here. When I played here for the first time I realised that the music is not just for pleasure, not some nice, elitist thing for people who have everything. And it turned out to be a very powerful weapon. I am a pianist, my only weapon is my music. What happened in the Donbass and, fortunately, did not happen in the Crimea … I wanted to support the people. I looked in horror at what happened there and realised that there is no return to the past. Odessa was a disaster for me, because my roots are from Odessa. I felt sorry for the young people at the last Maidan as they believed in the bright future while I had experienced it already and knew everything. We had such independence… Then that generation realised that it was deceived and all of them left. I used to speak Mova and run around in embroidered blouses. I am from the generation from the period of the Soviet Union collapse. Maidan… I was perceiving it somehow differently. Valentina Lisitsa (VL) – I have been closely watching situation from the very beginning and my heart was bleeding. But you are here for the second time already. And it is somehow sad that so few musicians and actors come here to support the people of the Donbass, they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. ‘I used to run around in embroidered blouses too’ĪK & DS – We have been performing here since the very beginning – since March 2014. Before her performance in Donetsk we popped in to her rehearsal. Tickets to her concerts sold out in a few hours. She, despite risking to become a ‘persona non grata’ in her professional circles, comes again and again to perform in the war-torn land. Her support of the Donbass caused her many serious scandals, broke relationships with friends and colleagues both in the Ukraine, where she comes from, and in Europe. And not only for her professional qualities, but for her position which she persistently, not in a western way, stands for. Special correspondents of KP Alexander Kots ( AK) and Dmitry Steshin ( DS) spoke with the famous pianist before her concert in Donetsk.Ĭlassical pianist Valentina Lisitsa is not just loved in the Donbass, she is worshipped. However, one must note that Lisitsa has learned a great deal of music, recorded almost all of it at least intelligently, and cast a valuable light on a neglected segment of Tchaikovsky's output.Translated by Alexander Fedotov / Edited by Elena 37, and her tempi in a piece like the "June: Barcarole" can be uncomfortably slow. You might find that a Pletnev would offer more flair and oomph in the Grand Sonata, Op. Lisitsa in the main keeps to the rather restrained style she cultivated on YouTube. Sample, for instance, the Volunteer Fleet March, from the "Works Without Opus Numbers" disc (the album is organized thematically rather than chronologically, which makes sense). These are, as annotator Philip Ross Bullock concedes, of varying quality, but there is something catchy about them more often than not. She records every scrap of music Tchaikovsky ever wrote for the piano, including an unfinished student work, a set of 50 folk song arrangements for piano four hands (recorded with Lisitsa's personal and artistic partner Alexei Kuznetsoff), an operatic potpourri, juvenilia, and a huge assortment of occasional short pieces. As it happens, Lisitsa will probably find buyers. Lisitsa has been able to parlay that popularity into a more conventional career, but for a pianist who has built her reputation on internet moments to essay something like the complete solo piano works of Tchaikovsky, covering ten CDs (about 11 hours of music in total) is unorthodox, or gutsy perhaps. Whatever one thinks of her playing, it's clear pianist Valentina Lisitsa deserves everyone's thanks for showing that there is nothing wrong with the state of classical music, only with the way it is presented: views of her YouTube performance videos number in the tens of millions. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |