Concerto for Piano and YouTube
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Visitors browsing through the YouTube channel of the pianist Valentina Lisitsa
can watch her in hundreds of videos. There are live webcams of her
practicing at her home in North Carolina, long blonde hair tossing and
brow furrowed in concentration as she reads through new works. There she
is in a red gown playing Schumann’s “Traumerei” at a concert in Seoul,
and recording Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 at the Abbey Road Studios in London.
Ms. Lisitsa, 43, resurrected a completely stalled career through
YouTube. Since posting her first video in 2007, she has attracted more
than 62 million views and some 105,000 subscribers to her channel. This
Ukrainian-born pianist now has a busy calendar and a contract with
Decca, which recently released her new Liszt disc. She will open the 92nd Street Y’s fall season on Saturday with a program of Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Chopin and Liszt; the works were selected by an online vote.
“I was sitting alone in North Carolina eating potato chips, blaming
everyone, blaming my parents,” Ms. Lisitsa said in a recent interview in
Manhattan. “It’s a sinkhole, and it’s very difficult to get out. It’s
only when you stop trying to find faults and start doing something
constructive that you will survive.” She added, “It’s just good for you
as a human not to dwell on your disasters.”
Casually dressed in jeans, glittery flip-flops and an orange shirt she
had bought for her son, Ms. Lisitsa was frazzled but gregarious after a
trip to New York from Paris. She spoke about the low points in her
career, including a Christmas when her application to perform in a
concert at a nursing home was rejected and a stint selling housewares on
eBay.
Ms. Lisitsa’s eureka moment came when reading a child’s version of
“1,001 Nights” to her son, Benjamin, now 8. “There were all those
beautiful women, like another blonde Russian pianist,” she said. “They
all got killed after the first night. This one did not. Why not? She
came with a story. You have to invent your story. You can call it
gimmicky, but whatever works. Something that stops making you a
commodity.”
Earlier in her career, Ms. Lisitsa said, she felt like a commodity
herself, an “easily interchangeable” female musician who could be called
upon at the last minute to wear a fancy gown and trot out Tchaikovsky
and Rachmaninoff.
She had begun her career as a duo pianist with her husband, Alexei
Kuznetsoff. After winning a competition in 1991, they obtained
management, but the engagements dried up. “We were naïve and thought
that if you play well, people will notice you,” she said. “But music is a
luxury product, and if you see a Mont Blanc pen or Rolex watch in
Walmart, people will just pass by. It has to come with a certain
package, and you have to have your own audience.”
After a midlife crisis when she considered quitting music, Ms. Lisitsa
decided to be proactive. Her husband filmed her playing Chopin’s 24
Études, which they released as a DVD on Amazon.com in 2007. The couple
were initially irritated when people uploaded sections to YouTube, but
they decided to upload the entire DVD themselves as a promotion. The
tactic worked, and sales increased. They took another gamble when they
spent their life savings to hire the London Symphony Orchestra so Ms.
Lisitsa could record the four Rachmaninoff concertos, which Decca has
now released.
Niall O’Rourke, the creative director at Decca’s London office, said Ms.
Lisitsa’s use of YouTube was new territory for the label’s classical
artists. “It’s more of pop approach,” he said, noting the success of
Justin Bieber and others discovered on YouTube. “Valentina was on our
radar, and when we saw how many YouTube followers she had, we wondered
how to tap into that fan base. It was an experiment.” Other classical
musicians, like the violinist Hilary Hahn
(with whom Ms. Lisitsa recorded sonatas by Ives), are certainly active
on YouTube, but Ms. Lisitsa is one of the first to have built a highly
successful career via the medium.
On a video called “I Hate Rachmaninoff,”
Ms. Lisitsa describes how she rebelled against his music when pressured
to perform it in competitions in Ukraine, saying, “I didn’t want to
touch his music with dirty, competition hands.” In Rachmaninoff and the
other works she has recorded, she is passionate, communicative and
deeply expressive. Reviewing her performance of the Liszt Concerto with
the Warsaw Philharmonic, Steve Smith wrote in The New York Times that
“Ms. Lisitsa’s range of colors and expressive shadings was consistently
impressive; in the second movement she executed trills with an
attention-grabbing precision.”
While speaking to the audience at her Live From the Albert Hall concert
(which was recorded for CD and DVD), she self-deprecatingly remarked
that her microphone would need a Slavic filter to process her heavy
accent, before joking about the soccer match between England and Ukraine
taking place at the same time as the concert.
Ms. Lisitsa grew up in Kiev, Ukraine, where she began playing at 3. Her
mother, Valentina, a seamstress, encouraged her to become a music
teacher. After studies at the Kiev Conservatory and a stint as a serious
chess player, the pianist and her husband immigrated to America. After
living in Indiana and Miami Beach, they bought a house in a rural,
wooded area east of Raleigh. One video on her channel is called “Practicing Piano in North Carolina During Hurricane Irene.”
Below the video are Ms. Lisitsa’s comments about the experience. She
actively engages her fans on social media. Unlike the polite feeds of
some other classical artists, Ms. Lisitsa, a self-described
“contrarian,” is argumentative and outspoken, tweeting about politics
and berating concert promoters who have irked her.
Her liberal attitude to listeners photographing or recording her
concerts distinguishes her from many of her colleagues. At pop events,
audience members ubiquitously record the music, but the practice is
invariably prohibited at formal classical spaces. At Carnegie Hall,
ushers zealously race down the aisles to berate any device-toting
offenders publicly.
In June, during a concert in Essen, Germany, the Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman stopped performing after becoming distracted
by an audience member filming him. He left the stage; when he returned,
he told the audience, “The destruction of music because of YouTube is
enormous,” claiming that he had been refused recording contracts because
his music was already online.
The violinist James Ehnes has also expressed concern about YouTube.
After noticing someone filming one of his performances and feeling
“surprise and mild annoyance,” he wrote an article for The Huffington Post about his conflicted feelings regarding the ethical and economic issues of illicit recordings.
Classical music needs to evolve more quickly, Ms. Lisitsa said. “There
is a long train, and we’re the last car in the train. Pop music is the
first car. Now, any new song Lady Gaga does, she puts on YouTube first.
And I don’t think she has trouble selling her CDs.”
Far from destroying classical music, Ms. Lisitsa said, YouTube will
create a new audience. “We are perpetually complaining about our
audiences being old,” she said.
“They are always dying but never quite die, because there will always be
more old people,” she added, referring to a letter that Chopin wrote
about one concert at which there were no young people in the audience
because it was the start of hunting season.
“Just as kids who initially like bubbly and graduate to fine wine, some
people will graduate to the finer elements of classical music via
YouTube,” she said.
The medium also offers listeners a chance to decide for themselves, she
said. “The movers and shakers find and proclaim ‘the next Horowitz,’
then it drips down to the people, with the perfect recording and glossy
magazines,” she said. “Then if deep inside people don’t enjoy it, they
feel guilty and that they’re not educated enough to enjoy it.” As with a
restaurant, if the food or service is horrid “you just don’t go back,”
she said. “You don’t think ‘I’m not educated enough to comprehend this
octopus with chocolate crumble.’ ”
What is needed in the digital era, she said, is a measure of device
etiquette. “People know when they go to restaurants, they are not
supposed to burp,” she said. “So when they go to concerts, they can take
off the flash off the camera.”
YouTube also presents a challenge to maintaining the unhealthy status
quo of perfection in the classical industry. Every tiny flaw can forever
be immortalized on video, which in turn can stifle artists from taking
risks, resulting in note-perfect boring performances.
There have been many brutal comments posted under Ms. Lisitsa’s own
videos about her wrong notes and imperfections. “You get a thick skin,”
she said. But she rushes online to stand up for other musicians. She
once defended the pianist Mitsuko Uchida from nitpicky YouTube
commenters highlighting a microscopic error in one of Ms. Uchida’s live
performances.
“Classical musicians behave in the same way as young girls looking at
fashion magazines and starving themselves,” Ms. Lisitsa said. “Would-be
musicians are starving themselves emotionally and intellectually just to
be perfect.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/arts/music/valentina-lisitsa-jump-starts-her-career-online.html?_r=0
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