Chopin’s works are the bread and butter of any aspiring young pianist. I was no exception to that rule, as my years of musical studies were very conventional, with the obligatory masterclasses, competitions, showcases. Being part-Polish, I might claim that I have some innate understanding of Chopin’s music. But I don’t subscribe to the popular notion that people are best able to play the music of their own culture and background. Like good actors or writers we have to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of our ‘characters’, whatever their country or epoch. There is nothing that an avid mind and a thorough immersion in the relevant history, literature, even folk music, can’t transcend.

A newly signed Naïve artist, pianist Valentina Lisitsa explores the unveiled links between two of the most stunning works ever composed for the piano, and both of them in 1908: Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit and Rachmaninov's piano sonata. Valentina Lisitsa is not only the first YouTube Star of classical music; more importantly, she is the first classical artist to have converted her internet success into a global concert career in the principal venues of Europe, the USA, South America and Asia. She posted her first video on the internet platform YouTube in 2007, a recording of Rachmaninoff's Étude op.39/6. The number of views in-creased in staggering fashion; more videos followed. The foundation stone of a social network career unparalleled in the history of classical music was laid. Thanks to an unwavering dedication towards her audience and a personal approach to videos, her YouTube channel now records over 650,000 subscribers and 147 million views with an average of 75,000 views per day, whilst her Spotify account has over one million listeners monthly.

A coming together of two artists with enormous followings – Valentina Lisitsa, with her dazzling artistry and hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube, and Michael Nyman, with his hugely popular film soundtracks. This release, in the year of Nyman’s 70th birthday, features tracks from his multi-award-winning score for the 1993 smash hit film The Piano. Acclaimed for his music’s innovation, punchy simplicity and universal appeal, Nyman, during his career as a music critic, coined the term ‘minimalism’ for an emergent musical genre – one to which he would make extensive contributions in many of his early scores and inspire a vast global audience. The disc is packed full with 77mins of material, full of irresistible energy. The album includes all ten solo piano transcriptions from The Piano, together on one album for the first time.

Valentina Lisitsa, a stunning virtuosic pianist, has become the first classical musician to achieve fame via YouTube, emulating Justin Bieber s achievement in the pop world. Having amassed an impressive 43 million views on her channel, Valentina is now in the unique position of going straight to one of the world s leading concert venues for her central London debut. The self-made virtuoso who has achieved all of this on her own without the help of a manager or promoter has now leapfrogged even the world s most revered and long-established pianists and thrown the traditional concert hall route out of the window. Having already booked the 5000-seater Royal Albert Hall in which to perform, Valentina was today in London four weeks ahead of her June 19th date to undertake her own concert promotion. As a thank you to her current online fans Valentina is determined to make the concert a fully digital and interactive experience by inviting fans to vote online to decide what she will play and by fully streaming the concert live via YouTube for those who can t travel to London. This level of online digital interaction is a first for a solo classical concert.

Valentina Lisitsa's double-CD of the music of Philip Glass is a generous collection of excerpts drawn from his film music, including The Hours, The Truman Show, and Mishima, as well as from concert works, such as Glassworks, How Now, The Metamorphosis, and Mad Rush, among other selections. While Glass achieved fame through his early ensemble pieces, where he developed a bright-edged sound through the use of electronic keyboards, his minimalism is easily adaptable to the piano, though the characteristic ostinato patterns that gave his earlier scores a fierce energy are somewhat softened in the piano's blander sonorities and more introspective tone. Lisitsa has found a niche in playing minimalist music, as she demonstrated on her successful 2014 album, Chasing Pianos, where she explored the film music of Michael Nyman. This collection is a natural follow-up, and Lisitsa's aptitude for Glass' style is shown in her steady, rocking rhythms and even dynamics, as well as in her poignantly lyrical expressions.