Posted on 04/10/2015 7:45:38 AM PDT by Borges
On April 8 and 9, the pianist Valentina Lisitsa was to perform the Rachmaninoff 2nd concerto with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. This week, the orchestra paid out her contract, citing “deeply offensive” comments she was alleged to have made on her Twitter feed about the ongoing conflict in her native Ukraine.
Lisitsa, 41, who came to prominence through her YouTube videos and who has a huge social-media following, fired back promptly and at some length in a Facebook post (despite, she averred, pressure from the symphony not to go public about the incident). She makes no bones about having taken sides in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine; she is on the side of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who represent the majority in the Crimea, and vehemently opposed to the current Ukrainian leadership. Her posts on Twitter repeatedly call Ukrainians Nazis and depicts them as a population of idiots and the insane; one purports to illustrate the leadership’s faces with a photograph of pigs’ testicles.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Toronto has a large Ukrainian population.
Free speech has a price.
And, to her credit, she seems more than willing to pay that price and then double down. I really can't sort out the good guys from the bad guys in the whole Ukraine mess so I don't really know where I stand. But, it is refreshing to see someone take a stand and not back off or grovel when the "you can't say that" crowd brings all their weapons to bear.
I was born in Odessa and side her Lisitsa in this matter but certainly the TSO has no obligation to employ her if they think she is bad for business. Lisitsa scheduled a free concert in the area that night but now the church she was to play at is also backing out...
But do they all support one side in the conflict?
Here is what she said when she went public with this story on her public Facebook page (this is not the entire message)....
Dear fans, DEAR FRIENDS!
I have a confession to make and a huge favor to ask all of you. I really REALLY need your help now.
But first, my confession.
Over the last year I have been leading a double life. There was me - a “celebrity” pianist hopping from a concert to a concert, all over the world; learning new pieces, meeting fans, recording, chirping about my happiness in upbeat interviews
But there was another me: not a musician but a regular human being - a daughter, a mother, a wife. And this human being was watching helplessly how the country of my birth, of my childhood, of my first falling in love - this country was sliding ever faster into the abyss. Children die under bombs, old ladies die of starvation, people burned alive...
The worst thing that can happen to any country is fratricide war, people seeing each other, their neighbors as enemies to be eliminated. This is what has befallen my beautiful Ukraine. My heart was bleeding. You all saw on TV screens all over the world a magnificent revolution, the people of Ukraine raising in fury against their corrupt rulers, for a better life. I was so proud of my people! But the ruling class doesn’t let go easily. They managed to cunningly channel away the anger, to direct it to other, often imaginable, enemies - and worse, to turn people upon themselves. Year later, we have the same rich people remaining in power, misery and poverty everywhere, dozens of thousands killed, over a million of refugees.
So, I took to Twitter ( how many of you know I have a Twitter account? LOL) under a name “NedoUkraïnka” - a word roughly meaning “Sub-Ukrainian”, a stab at Ukrainian Prime Minister who called Russian-speaking Southern and Eastern Ukrainians “SUBHUMANS”! Yes, I kid you not. In an official written document. I am a subhuman, my husband, my mom....I mastered Ukrainian language perfectly, far better than a so-called “president” of Ukraine. But I don’t speak it to my family, I didn’t sing lullabies to my son in Ukrainian, when I sleep I never see the dreams in Ukrainian, when I will be dying my last words will NOT be in Ukrainian....
Sorry, I got carried away telling you those things... To get back to my story - I took to Twitter in order to get the other side of the story heard, the one you never see in the mainstream media - the plight of my people, the good and bad things that were happening in Ukraine. I translated news stories from Ukrainian language websites, I translated eyewitness accounts of atrocities.... I became really good in unmasking fakes published by Western media in order to make one side of the civil war look whiter and softer than Easter bunny, and another - as sub-humans, not worthy of mercy, the “collateral damage.
To give you just one example: one of my feats was to confront French fashion magazine “Elle” who published a glowing cover story about women in Ukrainian army. After the research I have shown to the magazine in my Twitter posts that the “cover girl” they have chosen to show was in fact a horrible person, open Neo-Nazi, racist, anti-Semite who boasted of murdering civilians for fun! The magazine issued a written public apology.
I was very proud! But with time my activities attracted a lot of vicious haters. I was a particularly important “target” because of being Ukrainian, thus - a traitor. I thought I knew hate - my playing on YouTube certainly “attracted” a fair share of hate mail. But I was mistaken. Death threats, wishes for my family to die, calling me “paid Kremlin wh*re”...the list goes on and on
My haters didn’t stop there. Trying, in their own words, to teach me a lesson, they have now attempted to silence me as a musician.
You’ve weight in on this conflict.
Nor can I, and I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable guy when it comes to world political hot spots.
I found myself the other day making a pretty good argument on a subject, only to have it pointed out to me that it was a pro-Putin stance.
Subject immaterial, but it does illustrate the confusion that reigns, much like the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian/Skyhook thingy back when Clinton was screwing the world over.
Sometimes I think you just have to have been born into it and lived it, in order to make real sense of it, so I think she may be more in the know than those that are trying to silence her.
Or, she could just be a carpet-munching, birkenstock-wearing, hairy arm-pitted liberal toad.
Lisista is rather conservative actually. Based on what I’m told by people who have spoken to her.
She’s also married and has a son.
That's a creative expression of personal loathing that took some effort.
Kind of silly to cancel her concert, and kind of silly of her - given her international reputation as a professional - to express her views so graphically and vulgarly.
But ultimately her views are just unsophisticated ethnic nationalism. She should stick to music, she's not very good at the moral analysis of geopolitics.
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