Valentina Lisitsa

Valentina Lisitsa built an audience before any record company had noticed her. Born in Kyiv in 1973, at the piano from three and giving her first recital at four, she passed through the Lysenko music school and the Kyiv Conservatory in the class of Ludmilla Tsvirko, took first prize at the Murray Dranoff two-piano competition in 1991 and moved to the United States. From 2007 she posted performances online — the Chopin études above all — and became one of the most watched classical musicians on YouTube, an audience she converted into a self-financed Royal Albert Hall debut in June 2012 and a Decca contract signed the same spring. Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven and Schubert stand at the centre of her playing, and the largest things in her discography are the complete Rachmaninoff concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra and the complete Beethoven sonatas; the Ives violin sonatas, recorded with Hilary Hahn, sit at its other extreme. She has recorded for the French label Naïve since 2021. Her first posting, in 2007, was Rachmaninoff's Étude-Tableau op. 39 no. 6. At the Royal Albert Hall she played to eight thousand people on a programme her listeners had chosen by online vote, and Decca issued the live recording a week afterwards on CD and DVD; nine further albums for the label followed, among them a box of Tchaikovsky's complete solo piano music released in 2019. She had made her New York debut in 1995, soon after leaving Kyiv.