Valentina Lisitsa Live at The Royal Albert Hall (2012)

Valentina Lisitsa, a stunning virtuosic pianist, has become the first classical musician to achieve fame via YouTube, emulating Justin Bieber s achievement in the pop world. Having amassed an impressive 43 million views on her channel, Valentina is now in the unique position of going straight to one of the world s leading concert venues for her central London debut. The self-made virtuoso who has achieved all of this on her own without the help of a manager or promoter has now leapfrogged even the world s most revered and long-established pianists and thrown the traditional concert hall route out of the window. Having already booked the 5000-seater Royal Albert Hall in which to perform, Valentina was today in London four weeks ahead of her June 19th date to undertake her own concert promotion. As a thank you to her current online fans Valentina is determined to make the concert a fully digital and interactive experience by inviting fans to vote online to decide what she will play and by fully streaming the concert live via YouTube for those who can t travel to London. This level of online digital interaction is a first for a solo classical concert.

Pianist Valentina Lisitsa was among the first classical musicians to use an internet video service as a significant method of promoting her career. Her strategy was successful: in the 2010s decade she was signed to the major label Decca and has been a fixture in its stable of artists. Lisitsa was born in Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, on March 25, 1973. She took up the piano at three and was giving concerts within a year, but for a time she hoped to become a professional chess player. Lisitsa attended the Lysenko School of Music in Kiev and then enrolled at the Kiev Conservatory, studying with Ludmilla Tsvierko. There she met pianist Alexei Kuznetsoff, and the pair began performing as duo pianists. They won the Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition in Miami in 1991 and moved to the U.S., settling in North Carolina.