I don't get the hype surrounding Valentina Lisitsa. She has a sound technique, I suppose. But she's an appallingly bad musician. I just listened to her recording of Chopin's G Minor Ballade. She hit all the notes all right, and obviously has a great command of the keyboard; but the strange rubati, bizarre accents, and the general feeling of watching someone whose pianistic role model in her youth was a player piano at a night club left me feeling rather cold at first - and then hot as my blood began to creep close to its boiling point. To add to my sense of having been musically shortchanged was the barrage of YouTube comments proclaiming that this was the best performance of the Ballade that they had ever heard. Oh really, now? Then obviously you haven't heard very many performances of the piece, have you? I get that Valentina Lisitsa is a moderately skilled pianist whose accessibility on YouTube makes her something of a novelty, and whose slight tendency to good looks makes her rather attractive to a certain section of the populace. She's made a few good recordings, too, particularly of Beethoven pieces. If she recognized her strengths and stuck to those, I wouldn't be here today blowing my top. But then she had to go and record the Chopin Ballade. To claim that her performance of the Ballade was anything more than gosh-awful is to insult Chopin and everyone who is a fan of his music.
Now, I get that different people have different opinions, and what is not my cup of tea may well be someone else's daily dose of cocaine. But this is not a matter of opinion. Valentina Lisitsa's performance of the Ballade was genuinely bad. Atrociously bad. So bad that I'm still reeling from the shock that someone could have executed the piece (read: butchered) in this way, played it back, and then decided that it deserved to be shared with a wider audience. There is literally not ONE passage or bar in that performance that did not lack in at least a hundred different ways.
To quote Marco Rubio: "Let's dispel with this fiction that Valentina Lisitsa doesn't know what she's doing: she knows exactly what she's doing." I remember five-odd years ago sending V. L. a PM on YouTube, having just listened to her splendid performance of the Chopin Etudes, in which I asked her why she didn't record the Ballades or Scherzi. I believe I now know the answer. It wasn't that she didn't know the piece back then. Indeed, the Chopin Ballade is one of the very first pieces by Chopin that anyone with delusions of possessing a passable technique (myself included) undertake to learn. She knew how to play it back then, all right; but if she had uploaded it before she had amassed a big enough fan base comprising people who had become tone-deaf from overexposure to her awful playing, she would have been cast aside like a used rag and become a footnote in the pages of history. Instead she chose to upload it now, when she could literally head-bang the keyboard and get 100,000 likes from brain-dead fans of her non-music.
To call Valentina Lisitsa a musician would be to concoct a definition of music never seen before. Can people not see that she is a real-life Mary Sue? The pianistic equivalent of Justin Bieber? When I listen to performances by Horowitz or Michelangeli or any of the other greats, I instantly see why they were revered as they were. It's not just because they were virtuosi of the highest order. Sure, there are pianists today who could probably execute acrobatics at the keyboard that would cause even Liszt's eyes to pop, but there wouldn't be a musical mind behind those mechanical fingers. I have never appreciated the consummate musicianship of past masters more than when I've had to listen to clowns like Lisitsa, Volodos, and Lang Lang entertain audiences with their circus tricks. Amusing, perhaps - but not music by any stretch of the imagination.
EDIT: Reading this entry with a cooler head, I realize that I have been rather unfair to Valentina Lisitsa. She does not have a sound technique - not by any stretch of the imagination. She's a hack posturing as a musician, and her followers are too dumb to see that. She takes on pieces that are vastly beyond her technical abilities (e.g., Liszt's El Contrabandista, which is seldom played, but only because it's musically worthless), and then insinuates in the video description that the fact that she's playing the piece when no one else would dare to do so implies that she's somehow a better pianist than everyone else. She does play this particular piece well, but that's for the audience to decide. She even admits with characteristic humility to being better than Liszt, which statement alone was responsible for an epidemic of eye rolling that lasted several weeks. Sure, Mikhail Pletnev may have demurred from giving a live performance of El Contrabandista, but that wouldn't have been for lack of technique. Pletnev, to be sure, is many things (including a child molester), but technically ungifted is not one of them. Valentina Lisitsa, on the other hand, has few gifts. We always knew that musically intelligent was not one of her vanishingly few qualities, and now we know that technically skilled isn't either. She can't even play a chord without having notes fly in every direction. The fact that she considers herself a professional pianist is embarrassing.
Now, I get that different people have different opinions, and what is not my cup of tea may well be someone else's daily dose of cocaine. But this is not a matter of opinion. Valentina Lisitsa's performance of the Ballade was genuinely bad. Atrociously bad. So bad that I'm still reeling from the shock that someone could have executed the piece (read: butchered) in this way, played it back, and then decided that it deserved to be shared with a wider audience. There is literally not ONE passage or bar in that performance that did not lack in at least a hundred different ways.
To quote Marco Rubio: "Let's dispel with this fiction that Valentina Lisitsa doesn't know what she's doing: she knows exactly what she's doing." I remember five-odd years ago sending V. L. a PM on YouTube, having just listened to her splendid performance of the Chopin Etudes, in which I asked her why she didn't record the Ballades or Scherzi. I believe I now know the answer. It wasn't that she didn't know the piece back then. Indeed, the Chopin Ballade is one of the very first pieces by Chopin that anyone with delusions of possessing a passable technique (myself included) undertake to learn. She knew how to play it back then, all right; but if she had uploaded it before she had amassed a big enough fan base comprising people who had become tone-deaf from overexposure to her awful playing, she would have been cast aside like a used rag and become a footnote in the pages of history. Instead she chose to upload it now, when she could literally head-bang the keyboard and get 100,000 likes from brain-dead fans of her non-music.
To call Valentina Lisitsa a musician would be to concoct a definition of music never seen before. Can people not see that she is a real-life Mary Sue? The pianistic equivalent of Justin Bieber? When I listen to performances by Horowitz or Michelangeli or any of the other greats, I instantly see why they were revered as they were. It's not just because they were virtuosi of the highest order. Sure, there are pianists today who could probably execute acrobatics at the keyboard that would cause even Liszt's eyes to pop, but there wouldn't be a musical mind behind those mechanical fingers. I have never appreciated the consummate musicianship of past masters more than when I've had to listen to clowns like Lisitsa, Volodos, and Lang Lang entertain audiences with their circus tricks. Amusing, perhaps - but not music by any stretch of the imagination.
EDIT: Reading this entry with a cooler head, I realize that I have been rather unfair to Valentina Lisitsa. She does not have a sound technique - not by any stretch of the imagination. She's a hack posturing as a musician, and her followers are too dumb to see that. She takes on pieces that are vastly beyond her technical abilities (e.g., Liszt's El Contrabandista, which is seldom played, but only because it's musically worthless), and then insinuates in the video description that the fact that she's playing the piece when no one else would dare to do so implies that she's somehow a better pianist than everyone else. She does play this particular piece well, but that's for the audience to decide. She even admits with characteristic humility to being better than Liszt, which statement alone was responsible for an epidemic of eye rolling that lasted several weeks. Sure, Mikhail Pletnev may have demurred from giving a live performance of El Contrabandista, but that wouldn't have been for lack of technique. Pletnev, to be sure, is many things (including a child molester), but technically ungifted is not one of them. Valentina Lisitsa, on the other hand, has few gifts. We always knew that musically intelligent was not one of her vanishingly few qualities, and now we know that technically skilled isn't either. She can't even play a chord without having notes fly in every direction. The fact that she considers herself a professional pianist is embarrassing.
Comments
Post a Comment