New Isler’s Insights Mini-Review

By Donald Isler

Voices – A Three Movement Suite for Piano and Historical Recordings by Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin
Inna Faliks, Pianist

This work should be of interest to those interested in Jewish traditional music, modern compositional techniques, and excellent pianism. The first movement was completed some years before the other two, and I liked it when I first heard it. The idea of a pianist on stage accompanying musicians from long ago struck me as wild, but exciting, and still does.

In that first movement one hears a repeated D minor chord over and over, but it has a mesmerizing effect, and leads into the body of the movement, where the pianist accompanies a 1912 recording of the famous cantor, Gershon Sirota (born 1874 – died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising – 1943) and his choir.

Is the past, past, or is it really part of the present?! This performance makes you rethink this………

The second movement, Zhok, features Ms. Faliks playing with a recording of a klezmer trumpet player, and that, in turn, leads to the finale, Freydele, in which she plays with a 1953 recording of the Yiddish cantor (they had female cantors in those days?!) and actress, Freydele Osher. The Suite concludes with a calmer, smaller version of the D minor motive which one heard at the beginning of the work.

A very big part of the success of this performance is the fact that the pianist, Inna Faliks, who commissioned Voices, is so impressive. She has strength, technique, intensity, and an ear for interesting sonorities that’s constantly at work.

Well worth hearing!

Donald Isler

Corona Fridays 5th episode

This episode of my weekly Spring 2020 concerts from my home features many of the poets I have worked with over the years.

This one features a reading of work the founding poet of Music/Words – Jesse Ball.

Program is Beethoven Fantasie op 77, Corigliano Fantasia on an Ostinato and Paganini-Liszt La Campanella.

 

Los Angeles Times Op-Ed: “Hashtags from my Soviet childhood”

by Inna Faliks

“We now live in a realm of buzzwords, hashtags, slogans that can seduce us with the neatness of tidily packaged concepts in our desire for change. But “equality,” “revolution” and “proletariat” are rendered meaningless in environments where they are overused. We’ve entered an age of Newspeak – though, unlike in “1984,” this is not part of government indoctrination but our own doing.”

Full Article

LA Opus Reviews Hollywood Piano Trio at the South Bay Chamber Music Society

by David J Brown

 

“…the improvisatory freedom of the Trio’s playing made particularly relishable the harmonic and melodic twists and turns that Beethoven executes in the first movement’s development section—which seem at the same time exhilaratingly unexpected and immediately inevitable.”

 

“…the concisely tensile Finale, kicked off by an imperiously arresting handling of the opening flourish by Ms. Faliks, was duly navigated back in masterful fashion through echoes of its predecessor to the final haunting reappearance of the first movement main theme…”

 

“…their combination of powerful emphasis and observation of the Allegro moderato marking enabled a truly exultant acceleration into the final Presto that set the seal on a fine performance of one of the greatest piano trios in the repertoire.”

 

  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