Controversial Ukrainian-born pianist dropped from TSO concerts

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This thread might not be the most popular, but just because I'm a pianist I found the need to post here. I've seen Valentina perform multiple times and she is nothing short of magnificent. I've also met her and she is even lovelier in person. Shame on the TSO for doing this:

Quote:

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra has cancelled appearances this week by Ukrainian-born piano soloist Valentina Lisitsa, apparently because of tweets she posted that were hostile to the current Ukrainian government. A terse statement by TSO president Jeff Melanson said Ms. Lisitsa was let go over “ongoing accusations of deeply offensive language by Ukrainian media outlets.” Mr. Melanson, who refused requests for an interview, issued his note after Ms. Lisitsa revealed the incident on Monday morning in a long, impassioned note linked to her Twitter and Facebook accounts. “Someone in the orchestra’s top management, likely after the pressure from a small but aggressive lobby claiming to represent the Ukrainian community, has made a decision that I should not be allowed to play,” she wrote, referring to her scheduled TSO performances on Wednesday and Thursday. “I don’t even know who my accusers are, I am kept in the dark about it.” Her Twitter statements have outraged prominent members of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, which broadly supports the current government. “Ms. Lisitsa has been engaged in a long campaign on social media belittling, insulting and disparaging the people of Ukraine as they face direct military aggression at the hands of the Russian Federation,” Paul Grod, president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, said in an e-mail exchange. Ms. Lisitsa did not respond to requests for an interview on Monday. Ms. Lisitsa’s tweets about the Ukrainian regime have included some harsh comparisons with Nazi Germany, sometimes laced with morbid comedy. “In a new European Ukraine, the camps will give the subhumans [ethnic Russians] condemned to gas chambers an opportunity to offset their carbon footprint,” she says in one. Ms. Lisitsa is an ethnic Russian who was born in Ukraine and speaks Ukrainian (she now lives in North Carolina). Her tweets are strongly supportive of the Russian minority in Ukraine, but she seems to oppose the civil war. “The worst thing that can happen to any country is fratricidal war,” she says in her statement, “people seeing each other, their neighbours as enemies to be eliminated.” “You might find some of [my tweets] offensive,” she says, “[but] satire and hyperbole are the best literary tools to combat the lies.”

Controversial Ukrainian-born pianist dropped from TSO concerts