• Valentina Lisitsa Birthdate

Valentina Lisitsa is not only the first «YouTube star» of classical music; more importantly, she is the first classical artist to have converted her internet success into a global concert career in the principal venues of Europe, the USA, South America and Asia.Washington Post Online wrote: “It’s striking that her playing is relatively straightforward. ‘Straightforward’ is an inadequate term for virtuosity. She does not tart the music up. She does not seek to create a persona, much less impose one on what she is playing.

She offers readings that are, when you penetrate through the satin curtains of the soft playing and the thunder of the loud playing, fundamentally honest and direct. You feel you’re getting a strong performer but also a sense of what the piece is like rather than of how Lisitsa plays it. I was impressed, sometimes dazzled and sometimes even taken aback by the ferocity of her fortissimos. And she is also a delicate, sensitive, fluid player who can ripple gently over the keys with the unctuous smoothness of oil.”Valentina posted her first video on the internet platform YouTube in 2007, a recording of the Etude op.

39/6 by Sergei Rachmaninoff. The views increased staggeringly; more videos followed. The foundation stone of a social-network career unparalleled in the history of classical music was laid. Thanks to an unwavering dedication towards her audience and personal approach to videos, her YouTube channel now records over 500.000 subscribers and 147 million views with an average 75.000 views per day.This singular success has led Valentina to perform at some of the world’s most prestigious stages which included a spectacular recital in London’s Royal Albert Hall before an audience of 8000 in June 2012 that sealed her international breakthrough. Listeners had the chance to vote online in advance for their preferred programme – a form of audience participation that has become one of Valentina’s trademarks.

DECCA gave Lisitsa an exclusive artist contract, releasing the live recording of the Royal Albert Hall concert only one week later on CD and DVD. Since then, Valentina has released a further 9 albums for Decca, including every piano concerto by Sergei Rachmaninoff, works by Chopin, Philipp Glass, Liszt and Scriabin as well as CD «Love Story – Piano Themes from the Cinema’s Golden Age» with major film music from the 1920s. In February 2019, for the 125 th anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s death, Decca released a special CD-Box Set: the most complete collection of works for solo piano by Tchaikovsky with some of the works having never been recorded before. “Lisitsa is a serious artist Her essential attribute is a fevered urgency, an almost desperate desire to suck the expressive marrow from a piece”Jun 20th 2012” Her energetic style is most dramatically captured at the end of the Third Concerto, galloping along with a coltish exuberance.”Mar 22nd 2013“The YouTube channel of Ukrainian-born classical pianist Valentina Lisitsa has more than 55 million video views and 77,000 subscribers.

This set displays his utter mastery, his command of touch, of line, of shape, his delicacy and strength, his nobility. No pianist better distils the profundity of this great music, for example in the monumental arietta that closes the final sonata.

DG's marketing claims the set ranks alongside legendary accounts by Wilhelm Kempff and Emil Gilels, the first six decades ago, and this is probably justified. Despite the long time-span and developing understanding, it has a powerful unity of vision and purpose. A full 40 years of Pollini's aristocratic majesty is represented here. He is renowned - indeed almost infamous - for the technical perfection of his playing and especially, his recordings.

But if you think that means an automaton's lack of feeling, passion and humanty, you're quite mistaken. In that sense, Beethoven is the perfect composer for him. The playing here is flawless but it is noble and elevated and always recorded with the engineering equivalent of awe. It seems to me what box sets of Beethoven Sonatas ought to be in every way.

Valentina Lisitsa Birthdate

The question for people who might be tempted to own a complete Beethoven sonata cycle is this 'whom can you live with?' Here, I think, is one you could spend a life with. And I wouldn't say that about that many others. Pollini's Superb Beethoven Cycle Enhances Canon.

Beethoven 28: Here is a vibrant interpretation of music that sounds intimate and experimental at once, the hands widely separated yet impeccably balanced, not least in the final cadence of the first movement, where the heights and depths seem to meet in a kind of Euclidian accord. The highest praise is owed the spiky fugue that constitutes the development of the finale. Few pianists realize the many strands of Beethoven's imagination as convincingly - an observation that goes double for the finale of 'Hammerklavier' in a performance of almost frightening authority. Listen to the manic leaps and trills! This is Extreme Beethoven. While Pollini does not observe the composer's near-impossible metronome recommendation for this movement, he fully captures the spirit of the main tempo marking: Allegro risoluto.

I plan to keep the Pollini box close to hand. the middle-period sonatas are still fine, and his steely intellectual readings of the late sonatas (Nos. 28-32) remain the best of their objective kind thanks to his superb structural understanding and brilliant tone. His 'Hammerklavier' (No. 28) sets the standard (along with Richter's) in this most demanding of Beethoven's sonatas. He is also excellent in the early sonatas, playing with wit and lightness at times and with passionate intensity at others. His concert performances (there are a few here) carry an extra frisson - notably, he plays the 'Waldstein' with tightrope bravura in a reading that takes risks successfully.

This cycle is a milestone in the history of the Beethoven piano sonatas. its completion is a boon to collectors.