The Toronto Symphony Orchestra canceled the performance of Ukraine-born piano soloist Valentina Lisitsa for her Twitte comments against the Ukrainian government.
On her Facebook page on April 6, Valentina
Lisitsa said that she had been dropped from the symphony because of her
political views.
The pianist accuses the Ukrainian government
of fighting against civilians in Donbas. She claims that the Ukrainian
government supports Nazism and that Western media lie about the current
situation in eastern Ukraine, according to her tweeets.
Lisitsa supported the EuroMaidan Revolution
but didn’t support the new government that came into power. She says that
everything has changed for worse: One “year later, we have the same rich people
remaining in power, misery and poverty everywhere, dozens of thousands killed,
over a million of refugees.”
The pianist says she reveals fake
pro-Ukrainian news and propaganda on her Twitter account. However, most of her
“exposing” retweets are from Russia Today, a Kremlin-funded state media outlet,
and from obscure Russian websites. Lisitsa’s story about the reason why she
launched her social media account seems to be inspired by Russian propaganda
too.
Her Twitter account name is
“NedoUkraïnka” – a word roughly meaning “sub-Ukrainian.”
She says it’s a stab at Ukrainian Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk who, the pianist claims, called Russian-speaking
southern and eastern Ukrainians “subhuman.” To support her claim, Lisitsa
attached the print screen of Yatsenyuk’s message written at the Ukrainian
Embassy to the U.S. on June 15, 2014 with the offense words highlighted.
But she got it dead wrong.
In his message, Yatsenyuk expressed
condolences to the families and friends of those military men killed near
Luhansk in the eastern Donbas war zone. In doing so, Yatsenyuk used the word
“inhuman” – not “subhuman,” as the pianist claims. He was also referring to the
killers, not eastern Ukrainians.
Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s president and CEO Jeff Melanson said on his Twitter page that Lisitsa has
been replaced due to the “ongoing accusations of deeply offensive language
by Ukrainian media outlets” and adds that orchestra’s priority is “being a
stage for the world’s great works of music, and not for opinions that some
believe to be deeply offensive.”
However, the piece Lisitsa was about to
perform has no political meaning – it’s Rachmaninoff’s second Piano Concerto.
The pianist condemns the orchestra for
censorship.
“Toronto Symphony is going to pay me not to
play because I exercised the right to free speech,” said Lisitsa. She was
replaced by Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear. He criticized Lisitsa for
“offending many people who perceived her as pro-violence and anti-love.”
The 41-year-old Lisitsa, who was born in Kyiv,
immigrated to the United States in 1991. In a three year-old interview to the
Telegraph, she says her ethnic background is Russian. The musician became
popular due to her activity in social media – her phenomenal popularity on
YouTube made her worldwide famous and now she is one of the internet’s most
watched classical musicians.
