Peninsula Reviews

by Richard Lynde

Inna Faliks began the “Music/Words” series in New York, and with her recent relocation as head of the Herb Alpert Piano Department at UCLA, has continued this unique and memorable practice to our state and county. In Ellen Bass, she could not have picked a better partner. Our poet said that for her this new way of thinking about music is “a conversation.” It began with her quiet reading of “Relax,” about bad things that will happen, such as fungus on tomatoes, cats run over, even a lesbian wife, all stated with a wry humor: like those to follow, what she called “talking poems” meant to be read aloud, something she is very good at. Faliks then took to the keyboard in Schedrin’s (b. 1932) “Basso Ostinato,” a blizzard of sound that was wild, fast, jazzy like Gershwin and reflective of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, a tour de force with underlying humor and perfect control.

Then Ellen Bass read again, this time, “Jazz,” about sending her poems out into the world as if a child, a modern take on our great 17th century American Ann Bradstreet’s own similar feelings. In “Waiting for Rain” she tells how the ancient philosopher Lucretius got her through the night with his idea of atoms “combining” and “recombining” amid the void. “When you return,” magically has eggs going back to shells, “letters unwrite themselves” and diamonds to coal to rotting leaves. Amazing imagery, fresh and immediate.

Next, Inna Faliks played the Mozart (1756-91) “Fantasie in D Minor K. 397,” a brief, intensely moody departure from his sonatas, which she made startling with its shifts between the opening Andante, then Adagio than a Presto played almost too fast to hear, but with perfect accuracy to end the high mini drama. Then, in “If you know,” Bass told of ticket takers touching palms with concert goers, followed by “God’s Grief” with startling images of God, Joan of Arc, Houdini – her words as magical as his magic tricks. In “God in Trouble” a beached whale decomposes, then in “Listening” she imagines having heard Keats read his “Autumn” to a friend. To “words like wine/ I listened with my spine,” both funny and profound.

Then in a brilliant stroke for both performers and audience, Faliks departed from the printed program which had Bass reading between movements of the huge Brahms (1833-97) “Sonata No. 2 in F Sharp Minor,” written and played by the composer in 1853 when he was “only” 20 and full of storm and stress along with tenderness. In the often fiendishly difficult and architecturally perfect four-movement work, played straight through and received with tumultuous applause, the noble work was the best-performed these ears have heard on this mighty Yamaha since Yevgeny Sudbin in a big Scriabin sonata almost two years ago. The Brahms began with a huge attack blaring forth the “allegro, not too fast but with energy.” The “andante with expression” was a stroll with purpose, a meditation that becomes intense and moody, alternating playfulness with severity, then lushness – typical of Brahms, and with Faliks sitting, as usual, with her face right over the keys, as expressive as the notes she was playing. The moving Scherzo was hardly a musical “joke,” but a brief lead up to the “Finale,” played with a gripping intensity, blazing keys played flat-fingered for speed like Horowitz, then a maternal tenderness like the famous Brahms “Lullaby,” coherent in all its many moods, and ending with a big bang. All gave a standing ovation.

Then Bass read three concluding poems, ending with “Reincarnation,” not returning as the “totem of a shaman,” but rather as an OYSTER! Very funny, very apt, very original, like all of her works. Faliks then concluded the intermissionless 110-minute program, which passed as if in a dream, with Liszt’s (1811-86) “La Campanella,” a glittering whimsical bon-bon that left a grateful audience with church bells ringing in our heads.

“…in a brilliant stroke for both performers and audience, Faliks… had [Ellen] Bass reading between movements of the huge Brahms (1833-97) “Sonata No. 2 in F Sharp Minor,” written and played by the composer in 1853 when he was “only” 20 and full of storm and stress along with tenderness. In the often fiendishly difficult and architecturally perfect four-movement work, played straight through and received with tumultuous applause, the noble work was the best-performed these ears have heard on this mighty Yamaha since Yevgeny Sudbin in a big Scriabin sonata almost two years ago. The Brahms began with a huge attack blaring forth the “allegro, not too fast but with energy.” The “andante with expression” was a stroll with purpose, a meditation that becomes intense and moody, alternating playfulness with severity, then lushness – typical of Brahms, and with Faliks sitting, as usual, with her face right over the keys, as expressive as the notes she was playing. The moving Scherzo was hardly a musical “joke,” but a brief lead up to the “Finale,” played with a gripping intensity, blazing keys played flat-fingered for speed like Horowitz, then a maternal tenderness like the famous Brahms “Lullaby,” coherent in all its many moods, and ending with a big bang. All gave a standing ovation.”

Full Review

The New Yorker: Jacaranda Series Review

How Arnold Schoenberg Changed Hollywood

March 11, 2024
Alex Ross

Of the thousands of German-speaking Jews who fled from Nazi-occupied Europe to the comparative paradise of Los Angeles, Arnold Schoenberg seemed especially unlikely to make himself at home. He was, after all, the most implacable modernist composer of the day—the progenitor of atonality, the codifier of twelve-tone music, a Viennese firebrand who relished polemics as a sport. He once wrote, “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.” The prevailing attitude in the Hollywood film industry, the dominant cultural concern in Schoenberg’s adopted city, was the opposite: if it’s not for all, it’s worthless.

Yet there he was, the composer of “Transfigured Night” and “Pierrot Lunaire,” living in Brentwood, across the street from Shirley Temple. He took a liking to Jackie Robinson, the Marx Brothers, and the radio quiz show “Information Please.” He played tennis with George Gershwin, who idolized him. He delighted in the American habits of his children, who, to the alarm of other émigrés, ran all over the house. (Thomas Mann, after a visit, wrote in his diary, “Impertinent kids. Excellent Viennese coffee.”) He taught at U.S.C., at U.C.L.A., and at home, counting John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Oscar Levant among his students. Although he faced a degree of indifference and hostility from audiences, he had experienced worse in Austria and Germany. He made modest concessions to popular taste, writing a harmonically lush adaptation of the Kol Nidre for Rabbi Jacob Sonderling, of the Fairfax Temple. He died in Los Angeles in 1951, an eccentric but proud American.

The Schoenberg family retains a strong presence in L.A. today. Two of the composer’s children—Ronald, a retired judge, and Lawrence, a retired high-school math teacher—still live in the area. Ronald occupies his father’s house, sharing it with his wife, Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg, the daughter of the émigré composer Eric Zeisl. Ronald and Barbara’s son Randy is a lawyer who specializes in the recovery of art looted by the Nazis; in 2004, he won a landmark case before the Supreme Court, resulting in the return of five paintings by Gustav Klimt. (The episode was dramatized in the film “Woman in Gold,” with Randy portrayed, somewhat against type, by Ryan Reynolds.) Members of the clan regularly attend performances of Schoenberg’s music in Los Angeles, delivering brisk judgments in the tradition of the paterfamilias.

Last summer, I was invited to a private concert at the historic Brentwood house. Three generations of Schoenbergs were present: I sat next to Randy’s son Joey, who collaborated with his father on a genealogical documentary titled “Fioretta,” which follows the family’s history back to sixteenth-century Venice. On an armchair sat a photograph of Schoenberg holding a class in the same space. Members of the basc Quartet, a young L.A.-based group, were on hand to play the composer’s First and Third Quartets, which they had been studying in advance of a residency at the Schoenberg Center, in Vienna. (The center houses Schoenberg’s main archive, every page of which has been digitized and made accessible online.) The First Quartet precedes Schoenberg’s break from tonality; the Third is from his twelve-tone period. In this setting, though, all the old mishegoss over dissonance and dodecaphony seemed beside the point. The basc Quartet—perhaps spurred on by the gaze of so many look-alike eyes—found the through line of Schoenberg’s personality, which is by turns impassioned, whimsical, savage, and melancholy. This is difficult music, to be sure, but it is fully human, bristlingly alive.

The hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Schoenberg’s birth arrives in September. A dedicated Web site, Schoenberg150, documents a surge of performances in Europe. Activity in America is far more meagre. The only top-tier orchestras that are playing original music by Schoenberg in the 2023-24 season are the San Francisco Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra. The L.A. Philharmonic, Schoenberg’s home-town ensemble, has performed only four of his works in the past ten seasons; the Berlin Philharmonic has featured as many in the past two months. Next season, the L.A. Phil will make partial amends by mounting Schoenberg’s gargantuan oratorio “Gurrelieder.”

It fell to Jacaranda Music, a twenty-year-old, exuberantly inventive chamber-music series based in Santa Monica, to give Schoenberg proper honors in his final homeland. Under the leadership of Patrick Scott, Jacaranda has presented scores by more than two hundred composers, most of them active after 1900. And, one evening in 2013, Jacaranda persuaded the keepers of the Santa Monica Pier Carousel to entertain riders with an all-twentieth-century playlist, ranging from Mahler’s Fourth Symphony to Gubaidulina’s St. John Passion. Sadly, in the wake of the pandemic, the organization found that it was unable to keep going. Its farewell season, “Planet Schoenberg,” unfolded from September to February, at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica. The title alluded to a line from the German Symbolist poet Stefan George, one that Schoenberg set to music in his Second Quartet: “I feel air from another planet.”

Works from various stages of Schoenberg’s career anchored the series: the string sextet “Transfigured Night,” a feast of overripe Romanticism; the First Chamber Symphony, a hard-driving exploration of tonality’s outer edges; the song cycle “The Book of the Hanging Gardens,” which hovers vertiginously at the border of atonality; the Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23, an inaugural exercise in twelve-tone writing; and the semi-tonal “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,” which uses Byron’s verbal assault on Napoleon to commemorate the war against Hitler. Together, these scores showed the spectacular variety of Schoenberg’s language. At no time did he call for the end of tonality; nor did he stop writing tonal music. Tonality, he said, “is not a necessity for a piece of music, but rather a possibility.”

That radical expansion of the harmonic field had a sweeping influence on all subsequent composers, whether or not they followed Schoenberg explicitly. Hollywood composers paid particularly close attention to Schoenberg’s music, and some studied with him directly. The great man was not displeased to receive these genuflections, although he appeared to resent the idea that his non-tonal vocabulary was useful primarily as an expressive crutch for scenes of tension and terror. Years ago, David Raksin, who wrote music for “Laura” and other classic films, told me that he once asked Schoenberg how he should score an airplane sequence. Schoenberg archly replied, “Like big bees, only louder.”

At the final Jacaranda concert, the pianist and conductor Scott Dunn illustrated the Schoenberg-Hollywood relationship by playing three pieces by Leonard Rosenman, who took private lessons with Schoenberg in 1947. Rosenman wasn’t writing for the movies at the time; that transition came about when one of his piano students, James Dean, was cast in “East of Eden” and got his teacher hired along with him. (Dean, a modern-music fan, liked to tell an anecdote about Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto: after Jascha Heifetz complained that he would need to grow a sixth finger to master the piece, Schoenberg supposedly said, “I can wait.”) Rosenman began employing twelve-tone methods in his film scores. During the planetarium scene in “Rebel Without a Cause,” the orchestra dissolves into a magnificent Schoenbergian melee. It’s hard to imagine how Hollywood could have functioned without the language of dissonance. The horror genre wouldn’t even exist.

Perhaps the finest recording ever made of “Transfigured Night” came from a group of studio-orchestra players: the golden-toned Hollywood Quartet, augmented by two colleagues, in 1950. As it happens, Jacaranda’s longtime resident string group, the Lyris Quartet, is also made up of veteran studio musicians, and their “Transfigured Night,” in January, extended the local tradition of back-lot Schoenberg love. (The full complement of performers was Alyssa Park, Luanne Homzy, Luke Maurer, Erik Rynearson, Timothy Loo, and Charlie Tyler.) They brought out not only the work’s sumptuous Klimtian hues but also the almost cubistic sharpness of its contrapuntal lines. Similar virtues were evident in a rambunctious version of the First Chamber Symphony, under Mark Alan Hilt’s direction, with the Lyris forming the core of the ensemble.

Jacaranda illuminated another aspect of Schoenberg’s wide reach: the sympathy he elicits among jazz musicians. Pioneers of jazz hardly needed to take direction from European modernism, yet Schoenberg’s pungent chords caught their ears. The jazz guitarist and composer Dennis Sandole was a close reader of Schoenberg’s textbook “Harmonielehre”; Sandole, in turn, mentored John Coltrane. That connection justified the most surprising choice of repertory in Jacaranda’s series: a nine-piece arrangement of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” featuring the composer-percussionist Kahil El’Zabar, the saxophonist David Murray, and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. This was a joy to hear, despite sound-balance problems. There may be a Saint John Coltrane Church in San Francisco, but his music doesn’t benefit from church acoustics.

On the same program, Steven Vanhauwaert, one of several brilliant local pianists who added lustre to “Planet Schoenberg” (others were Gloria Cheng and Inna Faliks), played Schoenberg’s Five Pieces, Op. 23. I don’t know if Vanhauwaert was deliberately searching out phantom jazz moments in the music, but his free-floating, semi-improvisational approach fit the cross-genre agenda. In the final measures of the third piece, four-note chords jangle against the elemental fifth of C and G, each giving off a smoky, sassy vibe. If it’s not jazz, it’s not from an entirely different planet. And, if it’s not for all, it’s for anyone who wants it.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/how-arnold-schoenberg-changed-hollywood

 

LA Review of Books

The Journey of a Musical Émigré: On Inna Faliks’s “Weight in the Fingertips”

By Herb Randall
March 18, 2024

“I KNEW I was a musician long before I knew I was Jewish, Ukrainian, or Soviet.” So begins the captivating memoir Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage (2023) by Inna Faliks, a distinguished concert pianist and now a music professor at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music. Her journey from child musical prodigy in Soviet Ukraine to an émigré artist at the highest levels of her profession takes several surprising twists, described in prose alternating between thoughtful and delightfully breezy but always deeply wise in its contemplation of a life spent pursuing an individual musical voice true to the disparate components of her identity.

Memories of Faliks’s upbringing in the Odessa of the 1980s filter through nostalgia about an “ideal childhood” and the naivete of a precocious wunderkind whose time is mostly spent practicing at the keys. Despite later realizations of the antisemitism and other injustices of the Soviet system, Faliks has a special fondness for the Odessa of her childhood, a city that so often casts a spell upon the many members of its far-flung diaspora. It is there, in the shadow of the city’s famous opera theatre, that Faliks begins her musical training and career, while also discovering a lifelong love of literature, particularly Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (1967).

Born in Ukraine but baptized in the totemic works of Russian culture, Jewish by ethnicity but not practice, Faliks reflects often on her conflicted sense of identity via her writing and music-making. Her sense of belonging (and not belonging) manifests while probing for a unique musical identity of her own:

How the arm was used, the body was centered, the shoulders lined up—all changed the sound and the expressive intent. In a performance, musical simplicity and directness were more moving than fanciful, histrionic pyrotechnics, giving sense of continuity and inevitability. I had been trained as a virtuoso—and [my instructor] was helping me use this technical confidence to channel the elegance and depth of the music. She was showing me that the sound I could coax from the piano was specifically mine—like my own voice. The voice had to speak honestly, naturally.

Faliks’s relentless practice schedule, intense training, and performance in competitions force her to grapple with the dichotomy that faces all musicians who take their art seriously: head versus heart. The most satisfyingly accurate performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations might astonish with its perfection in rendering every marking of the score but still leave the audience cold, while some of the most emotionally powerful music might involve little more than a punk band’s three power chords on an amped-up guitar, accompanied by a mighty scream. Equilibrium between these two extremes is the musician’s elusive Zen.

The quest to fuse technical brilliance with emotional depth drives Faliks’s formal education, from Europe to the United States, before she eventually returns to Europe. Like an apostolic succession of priesthoods, she recounts the series of piano teachers who ordained her, an unbroken line connecting generations of famous pianists and composers. This sort of authority counts for much in the elite world of professional musicianship, where the pupil’s teacher may matter just as much as his or her talent when it comes to competitions or securing a position. As she matures as both a performer and an adult who marries young (and disastrously), trying to balance a grueling practice schedule with domestic and social life, Faliks comes to realize that her instructors both fostered and sometimes frustrated her music-making. Finding her own musical voice requires her to choose the best elements from these mentors while digging deeply into her own rich experiences of joy, love, and tragedy to breathe life into her performances.

To the facets of identity that Faliks lists when asked “where are you from?” she adds the reality of being a young woman facing the inherent sexism—and occasional bullying—of the old guard of male critics, teachers, composers, and celebrity artists that dominates the industry. She recounts an incident when she was 18 and the teacher of a master class she was attending leered over her shoulder and down her shirt while playing a piece that required extreme dexterity—and that, coincidently, also had the effect of accentuating the breasts of female artists. “The best revenge is living well,” she writes,

so instead of reporting this incident and every other similar incident throughout my career—as I perhaps should have—I simply chose to forge on. It has never been about the discomfort and fear of speaking out in the treacherous, male-dominated […] field of classical music. For a long time, I simply didn’t know that speaking out was a choice.

Today, many victims of such abuse have come to understand that they do have this choice and perhaps more power than they once did to bring offenders’ misdeeds to light and break the cycle of predation. Much progress still must be made in the rarefied world that Faliks inhabits, as witnessed only this spring when the renowned conductor John Eliot Gardiner was forced to withdraw from an opera tour after assaulting a young singer who vexed him by exiting the stage on the wrong side. However belatedly, the idea that such musical “geniuses” are untouchable is finally being challenged.

Faliks cleverly adopts the musical device of the interlude several times throughout Weight in the Fingertips, momentarily pausing or shifting her narrative with beautifully descriptive essays that focus on specific musical pieces or artists that have touched her deeply. One of the most affecting of these interludes is devoted to Clara Wieck-Schumann, a rare female composer in the first half of the 19th century. Married to the more famous Robert Schumann, she abandoned her own promising career to support her husband’s. Yet despite her admiration for Wieck-Schumann’s music and its inspiration for the women who would forge ahead as composers after her time, Faliks conveys a sadness when performing the woman’s music, recognizing that, like others of that time and place, Wieck-Schumann expressed troubling antisemitic views and disparaged the works of female composers. “Not all great artists have the opportunity, the capability, the historical circumstances to see past the assumptions of their time,” Faliks writes, “as much as we’d like to view them as perfect heroes.”

This nuanced appreciation for the fact that timeless art can come from flawed individuals is a lesson Faliks clearly applies to her own artistic progression, taking the best of what she can from her various instructors to strengthen her own voice. Having found in that voice a sense of adventure, and an openness to creating innovative interdisciplinary programs, such as her pairing of piano performances with poetry readings, she naturally turns her love of music towards fostering the success of tomorrow’s classical musicians. Her first official university-level teaching position was at Northeastern Illinois University, but fortunately for the classical music community of Los Angeles, she applied for a position as tenured professor of piano at UCLA in 2012, where she has taught ever since.

Faliks looks forward to the future of music while describing a tour she takes through China in 2019. She is greeted by enthusiastic crowds, showered with honorary degrees, and besieged by students eager to learn. Her vivid, colorful descriptions fascinate throughout, although the reader might wish for a deeper consideration of why classical music seems so vital in contemporary China. Why do crowds of all ages and incomes flock to see performances there while American orchestras struggle to fill seats and coffers, resorting to gimmicks to court a younger audience and relentless philanthropic appeals to stay afloat? Faliks draws comparisons to the elevated role of artists in the Soviet culture of her youth, and the expectation of dedicated practice and competition that underpinned it. Whatever the reason for the fascination about classical music in China, one must admire Faliks’s advocacy for the many young Asian musicians who come to the United States to continue their studies and build their careers. She warns against the stereotype often expressed by critics that non-Western musicians are too in thrall to technique, feeling that performers of any background must be given permission by their instructors to feel, and to express that emotion in their music. Regardless, it is encouraging that an educator and performer of her stature is so optimistic about the future of classical music, at a time when that feeling is not widely shared.

Weight in the Fingertips ends appropriately with a somber reflection on the current war in Ukraine. The poignancy of her questions is shared by many in, and formerly of, that country: “Did I feel Ukrainian? What did this mean to me? Suddenly everyone wanted to know, and I had no idea how to answer. I have always dreamed of going back to beautiful, elegant, funny, gritty, and culturally bubbling Odessa to perform. But I have never been back.” Even for an émigré like Faliks, who long ago left Ukraine behind for a new life that afforded her nearly limitless possibilities to grow into an esteemed professional artist, the land of her childhood still exerts a profound claim on her heart.

Today, despite the tragic war that rages there, the neo-baroque confection of the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theatre, where one can still hear the sounds of student rehearsals while strolling through the surrounding gardens, stands ready to welcome home the prodigy who traveled the world, performing her art and fostering the next generation of classical music’s vanguard. After reading Weight in the Fingertips, the reader can only wish for that long-delayed reunion in a happier, peaceful time.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-journey-of-a-musical-emigre-on-inna-falikss-weight-in-the-fingertips/?fbclid=IwAR2SzSN4LRXdci3uR3CITdZT3eYXeXDPOZfzD625osV0wIhC7MJ9r6QtI3E

 

 

San Francisco Classical Voice: Jacaranda Music Series

Jacaranda Goes Out on Its Own Terms With Exciting Schoenberg Celebration

Feb 25, 2024

Jacaranda, the maverick Santa Monica music series whose home base is a block away from the edge of the North American continent, is no more. Felled in midseason after a bit more than 20 years on the boards.

The reasons are not a surprise — rising union costs, a deficit that couldn’t be tamed. Co-founder/artistic director/prolific program annotator Patrick Scott hinted that “there will be something next” but can’t say what or when. In the meantime, we are left to mourn the loss of one of the more imaginative alternative music series in Southern California, one that was in the middle of celebrating the influence of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) during his 150th birthday year.

Unlike many organizations that pull the plug with no time for goodbyes, Jacaranda gave us fair warning in advance that it would be folding its tent. And rather than slink quietly off the scene, it went out Sunday afternoon and evening (Feb. 25) with a three-part concert “Fierce Beauty,” which hammered together some at-first-glance unlikely juxtapositions of material, forming a sprawling yet somehow coherent and fascinating whole. A dinner break and an intermission separated the segments. All told, the lingering farewell took about six hours to run its course.

There were two brief surprise cameo appearances by two eminent local pianists — Inna Faliks playing up a storm in one of Schoenberg’s Op. 11 piano pieces and Gloria Cheng offering a quiet, introspective selection from Op. 19 — and the charismatic young pianist Andreas Apostolou tore into the Gigue from the Suite for Piano, Op. 25.

https://www.sfcv.org/articles/review/jacaranda-goes-out-its-own-terms-exciting-schoenberg-celebration

 

B’nai Br’ith International

Inna Faliks and Bar Avni: Top Jewish Musicians in the Spotlight

March 26, 2024

As a piano virtuoso, educator and highly regarded author, Inna Faliks’ Jewish heritage is an integral component of her artistic persona, in all its aspects. Dazzling audiences during her recitals, guest appearances with noted orchestras, and recordings, Faliks is also known for her concert series which feature repertory by Jewish composers including Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg, These concerts shine the light on innovative contemporary works, some of which include the spoken word, that pay homage to Jewish legacy, history and tradition.

On March 10, during a concert with the Inscape Chamber Orchestra at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, Faliks premiered the three-movement “Lilith,” a concerto for orchestra and piano soloist written especially for her by Brazilian American composer Clarice Assad. A musical portrait of Adam’s first wife, of myth and legend, whose licentious and transgressive behavior resulted in her banishment from Eden, the music was also a journey, taking listeners on a wild ride as they experienced the mythic demon’s transformation from steamy and exotic temptress to a nearly combustible, destructive purveyor of erotic chaos and unrestrained desire. Underscored with colorful jazz and klezmer motifs, as well as snatches of melodies rooted in traditional Jewish and Arabic folk melodies, “Lilith” was an explosion of sonic energy, whose heroine, or more likely anti-heroine, was made visibly palpable through Faliks’ brilliant technique and interpretive gifts.

Another notable Jewish work performed by Faliks is composed by Lev Zhurbin, a Russian American composer and instrumentalist. “Voices” was jointly commissioned by the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, and Faliks herself, to whom the work is dedicated. This tri-part composition begins with “Sirota,” in which a simple, chant-like lament repeated by the pianist introduces a vintage recording of a prayer sung by Gershon Sirota, a widely celebrated Polish cantor and concert singer who died during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Not of this world, the haunting sound of his voice evokes a lost time and place, one of the life and culture that flourished before the Shoah. In essence a collaboration between two artists, one living and one who exists as a memory, “Sirota” is a muted expression of grief, an elegy that signifies and distills those emotions which cannot be translated into words.

Faliks, who also teaches at UCLA, joins forces with distinguished poets during her “Music/Words” concerts, performed across the country and broadcast on Chicago’s classical station, WFMT.

Faliks is now celebrating the completion of one of her latest projects. Published in 2023, “Weight in the Fingertips” is a compelling and intimate memoir which traces her musical journey as a child prodigy in her native Odessa and her family’s exodus from the Soviet during the 1980s to her years as a music student in the United States, her relationship to her faith and ethnicity, and her experiences as an emerging artist. Her life continues to be filled with seemingly infinite creativity.

Listen to Falik’s “Sirota” performance here.

Bar Avni

Selected from among 197 contestants from 47 countries, 34-year-old Israeli conductor Bar Avni has attained the coveted title of “La Maestra” as the first prize winner of the eponymous international competition for women conductors. Established in 2019, the contest is sponsored by the Philharmonie de Paris and the Paris Mozart Orchestra, whose young musicians performed the final movement of Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 under Avni’s baton live on the European arts television channel. Judges and observers praised her gestures, expressivity, charm, power and determination.

In addition to the award of €20,000, Avni also received the French Concert halls and Orchestras Prize, the ARTE Prize, the €2,500 Paris Mozart Orchestra Prize, and the European Concert Hall Organization (ECHO) Prize, which was awarded to her by its representatives.

Making guest appearances in Israel, Germany and Austria, Avni is a percussionist who began her studies when she was eight years old. She just completed a three-year term as Chief Conductor of Düsseldorf’s Bayer Philharmonic.

Listen to Bar Avni and the Bayer Philharmonic perform music by Brahms here.


Cheryl Kempler headshotCheryl Kempler is an art and music specialist who works in the B’nai B’rith International Curatorial Office and writes about history and Jewish culture for B’nai B’rith Magazine. To view some of her additional content, click here.

 

 

 

 

Inna Faliks and Bar Avni: Top Jewish Musicians in the Spotlight

 

New Album: Manuscripts Don’t Burn

My new CD, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, is coming out on Sono Luminus this spring 2024! It is my most personal CD yet, with premieres written for me in celebration of my my favorite book, the Master and Margarita, my Ukrainian-Jewish heritage, my poetry-music series Music/Words, my home town of Odesa, and my newly published memoir, Weight in the Fingertips, A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage, Music of Schubert-Liszt and Fanny Mendelssohn is also featured.

Manuscripts Don’t Burn is a famous line in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita – the retelling of Faust, the 20th century cult novel of an artist surviving in a Totalitarian regime, the love story, the burlesque with giant, vodka drinking cats and vampiric theater administrators.

I first read the book as a kid, growing up in Soviet Odesa. I took it with me when my parents and I immigrated, as Jewish refugees running from antisemitism, through Austria and Italy, to the United States.  Crossing the border, I worried that guards would discover my book, and I would be severely punished. Throughout the years, the book played a role in my life. My childhood best friend from Odesa reread the book in adulthood and decided to find me – we are now together for 20 years, with two kids.  I read the book to my mother as she was dying from brain cancer.

Bulgakov’s novel weaves through my own newly published memoir, Weight in the Fingertips – A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage (Backbeat Books, October 2023). I consider this very personal recording to be something of a mirror image to my memoir, as it intertwines the literal images from Master and Margarita with more autobiographical themes and layers.

The five premieres, written for me and recorded here, are vastly different in styles and esthetic. The understated, elegant Master and Margarita Suite by Veronika Krausas complements the wild, theatrical, brooding and extended techniques-filled “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” by Maya Miro Johnson.  Mike Garson’s Psalm to Odesa, an improvisatory ballad, with bits of my own improvisation based a well known Odesan song, sets off “Voices” by Ljova, a piece for piano and historical recordings of Jewish cantorial and klezmer music. Both take me back to my home city, currently under vicious attack, like the rest of Ukraine. The poetry I recite, sing and hum while performing the four-movement Godai – the Four Elements – is rounded off by the propulsive bravura whirlwind of Hero.  Fasil Say’s Black Earth takes the listener on a journey from Odesa across the Black Sea – a Turkish ballad and jazzy beats alternates with improvisatory melisma of a Turkish lute, played on muted strings of the piano. The rarely heard Notturno of Fanny Mendelssohn connects a gifted female voice to the others on this disc, as well as, perhaps, to the dark, impassioned character of Margarita. In Master and Margarita,  “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” is spoken by Satan when he retrieves the manuscript of a novel presumed burnt – and in Clarice Assad’s “Godai”, Steve Schroeder’s poem depicts the loss of a manuscript in a fire.

The lieder of Schubert, transcribed for solo piano by Liszt, riffs on the mythical and the Faustian lore found also in Master and Margarita: Gretchen (Margarita) at the spinning wheel, a mystical love story by the sea, a monstrous Elf King and the death of a child, of innocence, of joy – one’s worst fear.

This collection of music speaks to my love of dialogue between music and words. As in my Music/Words series, where I pair poets with musical programs in the form of a recital/reading, the connections between text and sound here are not just literal but emotional, based on memory, intuition, dreams and hopes.


NoHo Arts District

[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts music review of Inna Faliks’ “The Story of a Pianist” at The Athena Foundation for the Arts 2023 Spring Concert Series. Read entire review.

Inna Faliks performed her “The Story of a Pianist” in NoHo and played with a rare and uncompromising talent that demanded attention and I for one was more than willing to give it. The story of this pianist is as harrowing as it is adventurous. Each piece that was selected and played not only complemented her story but also punctuated the drama and emotion of leaving the USSR for a better life in the United States.

This virtuoso plays with such intensity and passion that, at times, you may forget to breathe. And at other times, she gently caresses the keys, applying just enough pressure to make the audience feel each and every note. Ms. Faliks’ understanding of the pieces she plays is not only technically flawless, but she also plays them as if they were being heard for the first time, as if they were made for us to listen. This fierce energy at the keyboard is balanced by the charm of her stories of a little girl playing on a kitchen table.

Performing Arts Review

by Daniel Kepl

Santa Barbara Symphony review – April 15, 2023: Beethoven Dreams
Performing Arts Review

[On Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4]

Faliks has crafted a signature interpretation of the work. Her confident playing, bold and articulate, is also a puff pastry of tapered phrasing and delicate rubati. Faliks demurs discreetly at cadential points and enjoys with delight, the fun of harmonic crunches, especially the sneaky ones. Her cadenzas Saturday night, particularly at the end of the first movement, were a pleasure to hear, as the artist contemplated then dissected, the art of nuance.

 

https://www.performingartsreview.net/new-index#/santa-barbara-symphony-review-april-15-2023

  1. La Campanella, Paganini - Liszt Inna Faliks 4:53
  2. Rzewski "The People United Shall Never Be Defeated" (excerpt, improvised cadenza) Inna Faliks 8:36
  3. Beethoven Eroica Variations Inna Faliks 9:59
  4. Gershwin: Prelude 3 in E-flat Minor Inna Faliks 1:25
  5. Mozart Piano Concerto #20 - II Inna Faliks with Chamber Orchestra of St. Matthews 10:27
  6. Gaspard de la Nuit (1908) : Scarbo - Ravel Inna Faliks 9:07
  7. Sirota by Lev 'Ljova' Zhurbin Inna Faliks 7:45