Cirkus Liszt Valentina Lisitsa (piano)

Programme

• Richard Wagner / Franz Liszt: Overture to Tannhäuser
• Franz Schubert / Franz Liszt: Selection of Piano Transcriptions of Songs
• Franz Liszt: Totentanz (Dance of the Dead), Paraphrase on Dies irae for Piano
• Franz Liszt: Selection of Five Études
• Franz Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No. 1
• Franz Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 19 in D minor, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 in D-flat major

Performer

Valentina Lisitsa

Valentina Lisitsa is not only the first “YouTube star” in the world of classical music; more importantly, she is the first classical artist to transform internet success into a global concert career on the most prestigious stages of Europe, the United States, South America, and Asia.

Valentina uploaded her first video to YouTube in 2007 – a performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Étude Op. 39 No. 6. The number of views grew rapidly, and more videos followed. Thus began a social media career unlike any other in the history of classical music.

Thanks to her unwavering dedication to her audience and her personal approach to creating videos, her YouTube channel now has more than 700,000 subscribers and 350 million views, averaging around 75,000 views per day. Her Spotify account has more than one million monthly listeners.

This unique success brought Valentina to some of the world’s most prestigious stages. Among the highlights was an extraordinary recital at London’s Royal Albert Hall in June 2012 before an audience of 8,000 listeners, which firmly established her international breakthrough.

The Washington Post Online wrote:

“Remarkably, her playing seems relatively straightforward. Yet ‘straightforward’ is an inadequate word for such virtuosity. She does not embellish the music or attempt to create an artistic persona, let alone impose one upon the works she performs. Her interpretations are, once you look beyond the satin veils of delicate passages and the thunder of fortissimos, fundamentally honest and direct. You hear a powerful interpreter, but also the essence of the composition itself, not merely the way Lisitsa plays it. Her mighty fortissimos impressed me, often astonished me, and occasionally even startled me with their ferocity. At the same time, she is a delicate, sensitive, and fluid pianist who can glide across the keyboard with a silky smoothness reminiscent of flowing oil.”

Listeners were able to vote online in advance for the concert program – a form of audience interaction that has become one of the hallmarks of her artistic career. A live recording of the concert was released on CD and DVD by Decca just one week after the performance.

Another nine albums for the same label followed, including all of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, works by Liszt, Chopin, Philip Glass, and Scriabin, as well as the album Love Story – Piano Themes from the Cinema’s Golden Age, featuring film music from the 1920s.

In February 2019, Decca released a special CD box set in collaboration with Valentina to mark the 125th anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s death. It featured the most complete collection of Tchaikovsky’s works for solo piano ever assembled, including several pieces recorded for the very first time.

In 2020, she founded her own label, QOR, enabling her to maintain an even closer connection with her audience. Under the QOR label, she has already released complete recordings of Chopin’s Nocturnes and Études, an album dedicated to Johann Sebastian Bach, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and embarked on an extensive project to record all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas.

For Naïve Records, she has recorded three albums dedicated to Scriabin, Ravel, and Chopin.

In recent seasons, she has performed in Barcelona, Valencia, Istanbul, Gdańsk, Brussels, Pasadena, and at the Madison and Amelia Island Chamber Music Festivals in the United States. She also appeared at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and gave her debut recital in Belgrade.

In 2023, she performed Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra.

She toured Brazil, performed with the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, and gave recitals in Bogotá, Dubai, Beirut, Milan, Turin, and Venice.

Highlights of 2025 included a tour of China and recitals at Carnegie Hall in New York, as well as concerts in Italy and Switzerland. In 2026, she performed with symphony orchestras in Brazil and Porto Alegre and completed recital tours in Mexico and South Korea.

Highlights of the current season include recitals on the island of Rhodes in Greece, in Sardinia, Italy, and orchestral tours in Mexico and Honduras before her arrival in Bratislava.

Among the notable achievements of previous seasons was a sold-out concert at the Auditorio Nacional with the Spanish National Orchestra, during which Valentina performed all of Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in a single evening.

She has also appeared at the Berlin Philharmonie, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Wigmore Hall in London, the Prinzregententheater in Munich, Carnegie Hall in New York, the NCPA in Beijing, Teatro Mayor in Bogotá, and at festivals including the BBC Proms, the Dvořák Prague Festival, and the Musica Mundi Chamber Festival in Brussels.

In recent seasons, she has appeared as a soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège, Staatskapelle Dresden, Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.

Valentina Lisitsa was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. She began studying the piano at the age of three and gave her first public recital just one year later. After graduating from the Kyiv Conservatory, she moved to the United States and made her New York debut in 1995. She currently divides her time between Moscow and North Carolina.