International politics have reached Carmel. Carmel Music Society canceled a November concert featuring Russian pianist Valentina Lisitsa, who had performances scrubbed in recent years due to her perceived pro-Russia views. Agata Popęda here, the Weekly’s Slavic expert-in-chief, with at least a part of the story.
Lisitsa comes with quite a background. Of mixed Russian-Ukrainian-Polish heritage, she was discovered as a talented pianist by a YouTube audience while living in North Carolina in 2013. The same year, she was described as “the classical pianist with 55 million YouTube hits,” then signed to a label in May, which released her London concert debut—at the Royal Albert Hall—a month later.
While her YouTube videos and most Facebook posts show her life as a musician, Lisitsa mostly uses Twitter (now X) to share her political views. Posts start in the time of the pro-Western Maidan protests in Ukraine, which resulted in the ouster of the country's pro-Russia president in 2014.
But soon her tweets and retweets became more provoking. “If people are really interested in digging deeper, they can see that I am not pro-Putin, I'm not pro-Russian. I'm an equal-opportunity slanderer,” she said in an interview. She also tweeted: “In a new European Ukraine, the camps will give the subhumans [ethnic Russians] condemned to the gas chambers an opportunity to offset their carbon footprint.”
In 2015, her concert with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra was canceled after controversial comments she made about the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Since then, many venues and organizations have done the same.
In early 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Lisitsa expressed her opposition to what she considered Western interference within Ukraine. On May 9, 2022 she played a concert in Mariupol, Ukraine in commemoration of its control by Russia.
It’s unknown if her Carmel cancellation was directly related to her posts—Carmel Music Society declined to comment on the situation, while Lisitsa had not responded to a request for comment as of press time.
Naturally, this story also presents a free speech issue, and when and where free speech ends. On X? On the streets? In a concert hall? And then, we have questions about artists as political individuals. Do they owe us moral decency because they are in the spotlight?