July 2024
Inna Faliks: Manuscripts Don’t Burn
Sono Luminus
Pianist Inna Faliks has issued recordings featuring material by Beethoven, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff, but no album’s she’s released, nor likely will release, is as personal as Manuscripts Don’t Burn. Consider: it includes five world premiere recordings written for her that focus on her favourite book, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita; honours her Ukrainian-Jewish heritage and pays tribute to her hometown of Odesa (also spelled Odessa); and augments in multiple works Faliks’ sterling piano playing with her own recitations. Faliks has no composer credits on Manuscripts Don’t Burn, yet the recording couldn’t be a more personal portrait.
While her command of standard piano repertoire is reflected in the inclusion of three Schubert-related pieces, Manuscripts Don’t Burn is distinguished for the most part by new material that speaks to her adventurous spirit. Further distinguishing her from other pianists, Faliks is a writer whose memoir, Weight in the Fingertips – A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage, was published in October 2023. She’s also known for her poetry-music series Music/Wordsand her monologue-recital Polonaise-Fantasie, the Story of a Pianist, which recounts her immigration to the United States from Odesa. All such experiences amplify the resonance of Manuscripts Don’t Burn; in fact, Faliks herself states that the seventy-three-minute recording is “something of a mirror image” to her memoir.
Considering how enduring a part Master and Margarita has played in her life, it’s fitting that the album (whose title comes from the work) would begin with Veronika Krausas’ Master and Margarita Suite for Speaking Pianist; the book’s Faust-related content, which involves an artist surviving in a totalitarian regime, clearly spoke to Faliks at an early age and continues to do so. Her arresting speaking voice precedes the piano part in each of the dance suite’s seven parts, with the poem identified first and the text read thereafter. At the outset, an ominous sarabande, intoxicatingly rendered by Faliks, announces the Master and Margarita’s imminent departure with the Devil; “14th of the Month of Nisan” colours the work with dramatic portent, after which a polonaise becomes a soundtrack to the nights streets of Moscow. A nimble-footed bagatelle evokes the dance of a devil spirit in the guise of a large black cat before the delicate epilogue resolves the work with peaceful stillness. The alternation between voice and piano proves powerful throughout when each intensifies the impact of the other.
The Faust story also informs Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, with the image here of the young Gretchen dreaming of Faust while at the spinning wheel and gradually losing control as her thoughts about love overtake her. The familiar strains of the song’s melodies entrance in Faliks’ beautifully executed performance, and like the two other Schubert pieces, Gretchen am Spinnrade is presented in a piano transcription by Liszt. Derived from a Goethe poem, Erlkonig (Erlking) involves the monstrous, supernatural Elf King and the eventual death of an abducted child; musically the oft-grandiose material suggests a horse’s gallop using repetitive patterns and the child’s pleading with urgent and desperate expressions. Set to a poem by Heinrich Heine, Am Meer (By the Sea) imagines two lovers by the seashore with the woman ultimately poisoning the man with her tears. Word-painting is deployed again when the musical temperament first evokes the calm of the sea and then the emotional turbulence endured by the pair.
Complementing the Krausas and Schubert pieces are ones by Maya Miro Johnson, Mike Garson, Ljova Zhurbin, and two by Clarice Assad (the digital version of the release includes two bonus tracks, Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn’s Notturno in G minor, H337 and Fazil Say’s Black Earth). Based on the Satan’s Ball scene in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Johnson’s theatrical Manuscripts Don’t Burn, for Speaking Pianist ranges widely and unpredictably from inner piano flourishes, sprinkles, and crushing chords to contemplative reverie and the recitation of a Russian text passage. Garson, most famously known as the pianist on Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, is represented by A Psalm for Odesa, a heartfelt expression that draws from an Odesan fisherman song, “Shalandi Polniye Kefali,” and incorporates improvisatory elements by Faliks.
As compelling as the album generally is, it’s Ljova Zhurbin’s Voices, Suite in Three Movements for piano and historical recordings that is perhaps the most striking for its incorporation of real-world documents of Jewish cantorial and klezmer music. “Sirota” augments Faliks’ hypnotic ostinati with the haunting sound of a 1908 recording of cantor Gershon Sirota chanting prayers for Rosh Hashannah in Warsaw. “Alter(ed) Zhok” pairs Faliks with a 1912 recording from Ukraine of an unidentified clarinetist, while “Freydele” finds the pianist playing alongside a stirring recording of the celebrated Yiddish singer Freydele Oysher from 1953.
Assad’s pieces have the unfortunate task of following Zhurbin’s, but they’re in no way of incidental value. Commissioned for Music/Words and featuring text by poet Steven Schroeder, Godai, the Five Elements, for Speaking Pianist features Faliks reciting, singing, and humming in its four short movements. “Dry Bones – Wind” conjoins blustery sound treatments, voice effects, and a poem recitation to an epic piano component; “Absence – Fire and Water” is animated by fiery rhythms and fluid runs; humming and atmospheric trills imbue “Earth” with a ghostly, Noh theater-like character; and “Ascension-Sky” concludes the work by cycling through swirling sixteenth-note patterns. Originally written as part of Godai, Assad’s even-faster Hero took on a separate life as a standalone piece available in different arrangements, with the torrential one on Faliks’ release the solo piano version, naturally.
Words and music illuminate each other throughout this singular expression by Faliks. It’s an extremely revealing portrait to the extent that in creating it she has shared details about her life, her beliefs and emotions, and her anguish over the vicious attacks being perpetrated upon her homeland. No one can ever totally know what someone else is going through, but with Manuscripts Don’t Burn Faliks has opened herself to others in such a way that they’re able to acquire a powerful sense of her own experiences.
https://www.textura.org/archives/f/faliks_manuscriptsdontburn.htm