Valentina Lisitsa's Solo Piano Recital

Valentina Lisitsa is not only the first «YouTube star» of classical music; more importantly, she is the first classical artist to have converted her internet success into a global concert career in the principal venues of Europe, the USA, South America and Asia.

Valentina posted her first video on YouTube in 2007, a recording of the Etude op. 39/6 by Sergei Rachmaninoff. The views increased staggeringly; more videos followed. Thanks to an unwavering dedication towards her audience and personal approach to videos, her YouTube channel now records over 680,000 subscribers and 147 million views with an average of 75,000 views per day, whilst her Spotify account has over 800,000 listeners monthly.

This singular success has led Valentina to perform at some of the most prestigious stages. These include a spectacular recital in London's Royal Albert Hall before an audience of 8,000 in June 2012 that sealed her international breakthrough. Listeners had the chance to vote online in advance for their preferred programme – a form of audience participation that has become one of Valentina’s trademarks. DECCA gave Lisitsa an exclusive artist contract, releasing the live recording of the Royal Albert Hall concert only one week later on CD and DVD. Since then, Valentina has released a further nine albums for Decca, including every piano concerto by Sergei Rachmaninoff, works by Chopin, Philipp Glass, Liszt and Scriabin as well as CD «Love Story – Piano Themes from the Cinema’s Golden Age» with major film music from the 1920s. In February 2019, for the 125th anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s death, Decca released a special CD-Box Set: the most complete collection of works for solo piano by Tchaikovsky with some of the works having never been recorded before. Valentina has released 3 albums devoted to Scriabin, Ravel and Chopin with her own label QOR in collaboration with Naïve Records in 2022.

Highlights of the past seasons include amongst others, a sold-out concert at Auditorio Nacional with the Spanish National Orchestra, where Valentina played all piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Sergej Rachmaninoff in one evening. She has also performed at Berlin Philharmonie, Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, the Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory, Wigmore Hall in London, Prinzregententheater in Munich, Carnegie Hall in New York, NCPA in Beijing, Teatro Major in Bogota and at festivals including the BBC Proms, Dvorak Prague Festival and Musica Mundi Chamber Festival in Brussels. In recent seasons, Valentina performed as a soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège, Staatskapelle Dresden, Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and Seoul Philharmonic.

Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Valentina started learning the piano at age three and gave her first public recital a year later. She graduated from Kiev Conservatory subsequently, moving to the United States and giving her debut performance in New York in 1995.