Anyone been following this?
I dun quite get what’s going on - she’s standing up for Ukraine and Toronto Symphony drops her engagement?
Wait, she’s anti-Ukraine? I thought she was from Ukraine?
haven’t heard anything about this. got a link?
Couldnt agree more
She was good in some things when I saw her, but her Rachmaninoff D minor sonata was terrible.
She uses twitter
Nothing of value was lost
You can be a great artist and a terrible person. Gesualdo (Murderer), Wagner (racist), Cortot (Nazi collaborator) and Pletnev (alleged pedophile). It’s possible to have cognitive dissonance about such people. It’s just part of being an intellectually honest consumer of art.
About Lisitsa:
I never liked her as a musician. She clearly has excellent dexterity and an ability to learn lots of difficult repertoire. But her interpretations are almost always superficial, both in terms of tone quality, nuance, and structural understanding.
In general, I think its crummy to deny an artist an opportunity to perform based on their political views. The TSO’s decision makes sense in some ways though. If you take the crude view that the TSO is a government-funded money making business then blocking Lisitsa is potentially both good business and good politics. As a Canadian, I think our government should adopt a pro-Ukranian stance and generally stand up to apologists for Russian bullying. Also, if it’s bad for TSO’s business to host a nationalistic creep like Lisitsa, it may be a sensible choice to forego that opportunity.
The bottom line is this: in a better world, the TSO would be above both business and politics. Then Lisitsa would have never been invited in the first place based on artistic considerations alone.
A final point about Russian nationalism today. I find it really rich that Lisitsa calls Ukranians Nazis while the Putin government supports reactionary political movements and illiberal institutions in the West (everything from Trump to Le Pen)
so Svoboda ain’t nazi ? 
Yeah, Svoboda definitely are. Obviously not an expert (or even knowledgeable) on Ukranian politics, but everything I’ve read makes me think that calling Ukranians ‘fascist’ is just a smear the Kremlin is advancing that sympathetic rubes like Lisitsa pass along.
Anyway. I found a site that seems to catalogue some of the things she said. Includes praise for the Russian backed forces that shot down MH17.