Valentina Lisitsa - Live at Royal Albert Hall (2012) [DVD9 NTSC]

Valentina Lisitsa - Live at Royal Albert Hall (2012) [DVD9 NTSC]


Actors: Valentina Lisitsa
Format: Classical, DVD Audio, NTSC
Audio: English
Language: English
Format image: 1.33:1
Number disc: 1
Studio: Decca
Date version DVD: 17 jul. 2012

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Valentina Lisitsa, born in Ukraine but now living in America, is officially the web’s favourite classical pianist. Her YouTube site has had 43 million visitors, which is probably a thousand times more listeners than the great virtuosos of the past reached in their entire lifetimes.

It was clear that the promoters had tried hard to make this Albert Hall concert as close to the YouTube experience as possible. Two big screens carried close-up images of Lisitsa, and at every possible opportunity these were replaced by a publicity photo, which like all publicity photos was glamorous and anonymous.

They were almost comically inapt, as Lisitsa is neither glamorous nor anonymous. She came on to wild applause, cracked a joke about the Ukraine-England football match (at that moment under way) in an accent you could have cut with a knife, clearly nervous and anxious to get to the keyboard. Those were the only words we heard from her. She didn’t emote verbally about each piece à la James Rhodes, and when she played she didn’t strike flamboyant Lisztian poses like Lang Lang. Instead she sat hunched over the keyboard, smiling to herself as if oblivious to us and the live audience on her YouTube channel.

It soon became clear Lisitsa is a serious artist. She’d chosen a hugely taxing programme, book-ended with two Liszt showpieces.

She played these with urgent intensity and a feeling for their sudden moments of pathos, which lifted them out of their showpiece status. Her essential attribute is a fevered urgency, an almost desperate desire to suck the expressive marrow from a piece.


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