The always fascinating pianist Inna Faliks presents works that touch on her Ukrainian home, where the works of Clarice Assad, Ljova Zhurbin, Veronika Krausas, Maya Miro Johnson, and Mike Garson are executed flawlessly.
“Master and Margarita Suite For Speaking Pianist” opens with spoken word, before the elegant and articulate keys guide us through 7 movements of diverse progressions, and “Gretchem am Spinnrade” follows with flowing, gorgeous finger acrobatics that are mesmerizing.
The title track lands closer to the middle, and it emits soft and unpredictable moments that are both intimate and cinematic, while “Am Meer (By The Sea)” is a poetic album highlight that’s heartfelt, emotive and full of beauty.
Residing close to the end, the dreaminess of “Voices” swirls with mystery and historical recordings, and the swift, animated “Hero” showcases Faliks’ stunning abilities that are gripping and memorable.
A body of work that illustrates her love of dialogue between music and words, the text present truly does add another avenue of Faliks’ unparalleled piano prowess.
Travels well with: Vedrana Subotić- Chiaroscuro; Ulysses Quartet- Shades Of Romani Folklore
“Weight in the Fingertips shows that Inna Faliks is not only a great pianist, but also a talented author who manages to portray a character accurately in just a few sentences, convey the mood of a piece of music or describe a funny or sad event. Above all, Weight in the Fingertips is a declaration of love for music.”
Review | Life as a Cadenza, Gilles Apap in His Elements at the Lobero Regional and Global Star Violinist Ventures from Classical Music Upward and Outward in Lobero Evening in Santa Barbara
Longtime music aficionados in Santa Barbara, on different sides of the genre aisle, have known and loved violinist Gilles Apap for decades and caught him gently breaking rules of classical virtuoso conduct on many local stages. The French-born, stylistically elasticized musician, who landed on the Central Coast more than three decades ago and who regularly alights stages in Europe and beyond, was concertmaster for the Santa Barbara Symphony for decades. He has appeared as soloist with that orchestra and at the Lobero (where he implanted a lingering memory of his moving performance of Bach’s “Chaconne in D minor,” and joined in a double-violinist evening with Caroline Campbell), was showcased in Los Olivos’ “Schoolhouse Concerts” series and elsewhere, 805-wise.
We’ve grown accustomed to his unique ability to dig deep into classical values, while freely roaming into areas of his musical interest, in bluegrass, Romani jazz, blues and more — sometimes in the course of a single cadenza.
But Apap’s latest concertizing spotlight in the hometown (or home region, as a one-time Santa Barbaran based in Arroyo Grande for years now) was something special. A sold-out house packed into the Lobero to catch his debut for the respected CAMA presenting organization, in a concert aptly (Apaptly?) titled “Gilles Apap — and friends! For Old Times’ Sake.” Considering the broad playlist on tap this night, the crowd extended beyond the usual classical-seeking audience, with listeners tuned into the sounds beyond Faure, Kreisler, and Paganini.
In that way, Apap’s CAMA occasion resembled the appearance of mandolinist wizard Chris Thile, who appeared in CAMA’s chamber music-geared Masterseries as a progressive bluegrass musician venturing deeply into the world of Bach. Apap took the opposite, classical-outward route. The rich first half focused on classical repertoire in conjunction with the stunning Ukrainian-born pianistInna Faliks, who capped the first half with a pyrotechnical Paganini maze for piano, not violin. The high point of this section came with an entrancing and too little-known “Impressions d’Enfance (Memories of Childhood)” by Romanian composer Georges Enescu.
Here and elsewhere in classical mode, Apap displayed his deep, lucid musicality, pouring forth in whatever terrain he chooses to take on. But the X factor and extra spice in Apap’s musical personality is his puckish humor and avid curiosity about music beyond the classics, a tendency gleefully embraced in the concert’s second half, as he took a trip or three into other musical time and place zones.
There was no South Indian Carnatic music — another of Apap’s worldly musical intrigues — this time around, but he did coral many local “friends” to be part of this festive pageantry. Returning to the stage after intermission, Apap slyly commented, “Let’s proceed into something very different.” Truer words have rarely been uttered. We heard old-timey music from the Gap Tooth Mountain Ramblers (featuring Peter Feldmann and Jim Wimmer), segueing into another concert highlight, a truly bedazzling and texturally sympathetic duet with Xiaoli Cioffi on the Chinese two-string erhu. Somehow, the pair made their stringed instrument sing in expressive tandem on Irish and Chinese tunes.
Apap eased into more improvisational showcasing of his violin expression with the Eastern European “Hot Club” style swinging Transylvanian Mountain Boys, a trio with guitarist Chris Judge and bassist Brendan Statom. The Boys’ set featured a brief, oblique blues tune by the late, great Santa Barbaran guitar teacher Bill Thrasher. The night closed out in earthy party style, in a micro-set of Bill Monroe–leaning bluegrass by the Phil Salazar Band, with Apap serving as fellow fiddler passing the soloing spotlight to the other stage mates. He’s humble, that way.
All in all, the Lobero outing was a dizzying and uncharted course of a concert, and yet perfectly in tune and in the expected alternative attitudinal groove for the violinist we’ve come to appreciate as a friendly virtuoso next door.
Ukrainian-born American pianist Inna Faliks has performed thousands of recitals and concerts in her career. The 45-year-old has also written a memoir, Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey From Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage, published last October by Backbeat Books. In her upcoming appearance at BroadStage in Santa Monica on May 19 — part of a mini-tour tied to the launch of her new album, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, which also lands at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on May 23 — Faliks will not only be demonstrating her musical prowess but also reading from her autobiography.
Born in 1978 in Odesa, then part of the Soviet Union, Faliks began piano lessons at age 5 with her mother Irene. Fleeing antisemitism, her family immigrated to Chicago when Faliks was 10; a mere five years later, she made her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
In addition to playing classics, Faliks is committed to contemporary music and has premiered works composed for her by, among others, Timo Andres, Billy Childs, Richard Danielpour, and Paola Prestini. In 2020, Ljova Zhurbin’s Voices was commissioned for Faliks by the Lowell Milken Fund for Jewish American Music, and for the pianist’s 2021 recording Reimagine: Beethoven and Ravel, nine contemporary composers responded to Beethoven’s Bagatelles, Op. 126, and Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit.
Now based in Los Angeles, the fiendishly busy Faliks is also founder and curator of Music/Words, an award-winning performance series in collaboration with distinguished poets. Currently professor and head of piano at UCLA, she is also a committed chamber musician. She’ll be in Northern California next month for a solo recital at The 222 in Healdsburg on June 8.
SF Classical Voice had a chance to speak with Faliks about her upcoming performances, her memoir, and her fervent attraction to new music.
How did your early life in Odesa impact you, and why did you decide to pen Weight in the Fingertips, which I understand was 12 years in the making?
My life in Odesa was a really beautiful upbringing, full of books, full of inspiration. I was what one would call a “child prodigy.” My father liked to make a joke that he was the only kid in Odesa who was not a musical prodigy. I was also a composer at [age] 9. Basically, the sounds, the smells, the sights of the city [and] my parents’ immense love for books [and] the arts made me who I think I am as an artist today.
My memories were so vivid, I began to write them down. I was pregnant with my son and had a concerto booked, and these vivid memories that were taking shape were more than just notes. When I moved to Los Angeles 11 years ago, it became a one-woman show, Polonaise-Fantaisie.
The book is based on that, but because of how long and engrossing and deep the process was, it became more than that story alone. Emigration from Odesa and assimilation [were] very complicated for a child in a new place, [but] it’s [ultimately] a book about love — of Hollywood proportions. It’s also a story of grief — I lost my mom to brain cancer a little over two years ago — and COVID. All of these things are in the book. It’s full of adventures and is really for everyone, not only for musicians or for people who know about music. It’s a fun, unputdownable read.
Inna Faliks
Your BroadStage program is quite varied. It includes Ljova Zhurbin’s Sirota (2011), Rodion Shchedrin Basso Ostinato (1961), and some Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin, along with a world premiere, Psalm for Odessaby Mike Garson, who’s perhaps best known for being David Bowie’s longtime pianist. How did you decide on these works?
Some are on my recording; some are mentioned in the book in a way that I think is interesting to audiences. [Beethoven’s] Eroica Variations is on the second half and is a small chapter in my book. It’s called “What’s So Great About Beethoven Anyway?” That piece is so delightful and joyful. It’s a wonderful way to end a concert that has moody music. The book has these longer narrative chapters, then shorter interludes. Beethoven is one of those.
Mike Garson knows so much about piano and piano music but comes from a different world. [His piece is based on a] famous song — not a Bowie tune — that everyone in Odesa knows, and I improvise a little bit. It’s a lovely, meditative hymnal that opens the concert. Following that is a piece by Zhurbin that uses a historical recording from [the] Jewish cantor Gershon Sirota. It’s a haunting piece.
You’re also playing a pair of works by Veronika Krausas, “Have You Stopped Loving Me?” and “14th on the Month of Nisan,” two parts of a suite composed for you in 2020.
Veronika is a good friend and wrote a very elegant suite for me on the book The Master and Margarita [by Mikhail Bulgakov], which is a big thing in my new recording. This book was almost like a recurring role in my life. I first read it as a child. It was banned and was an underground novel. I took it through immigration and felt naughty; I was a true dissident.
I read it many, many times, and it always inspired me in many different ways. I read the book to my mother when she was dying. It’s a great big love story — in my book and my life. My best friend from Odesa was living in Israel and picked it up and decided to find me. We [got married and] live in L.A. now and have two kids. Every good book should have a good love story.
That is fantastic — and with quite the Hollywood ending. The Wende Museum also commissioned Maya Miro Johnson to compose Manuscripts Don’t Burn for you as part of your Master and Margarita Project. Her piece makes use of voice, improvisation, and spoken word, correct?
Yes, it’s wild, with a lot of extended techniques. It’s very theatrical and is kind of crazy compared to Veronika’s piece.
Where does your love of contemporary music come from, what are your criteria in commissioning a work, and what is the process like?
It’s very interesting when music dialogues with something else. In Reimagine: Beethoven and Ravel, those were nine responses by nine different composers. The idea of creating a bridge between then and now and not having the composer bow down from the past but take it as a jumping-off point — these call-and-response type projects are interesting to me.
My criteria? [A work] has to be imaginative and rich and make me excited. My criteria are very, very wide, as long as the composer has imagination. I like music that in some way communicates powerful emotions. The style, the technique, it has to speak from the heart. I have collaborated with so many different composers, with completely different styles [and] compositional voices, but [I’m drawn to] the ones that are imaginative, honest, and speak with conviction and emotion.
[As for the process], these composers in my program are very good, and I trust them. It’s not like they show me many drafts. When I get the score, if something’s not clear to me — what the intention of the composer is, [for example] — then we have a conversation. It’s always so exciting and a pleasure. It’s also very neat to be able to have these dialogues because we can’t have them with Beethoven or Chopin.
Inna Faliks
Once a composer has written something and it’s being performed, they set it free. The best thing that can happen is it’s played differently every time. The fact there are so many different interpretations — that’s what makes it so alive. That’s why AI is not going to win.
I read that even as an 11-year-old, you scoffed at technical perfection as a goal rather than deeply considered music-making. How do you think that has shaped your playing?
I’ve always felt technical perfection in and of itself is not the point — even as a kid. For me, it was always about communication through music. I was always a very emotional performer — communicating the essence of the stuff. I don’t think that has changed. But your musical voice changes. You go through many ups and downs and experiences, but that essence was there for me — and hopefully will always be. In a way, my book deals with some of these challenges.
Since you teach at UCLA, I’m wondering what advice you might have for aspiring pianists?
I think everybody will have a life in music if that’s what they really, truly, passionately want. I have so many students who have a safety route, a double major. I never had that. It wasn’t a possibility for me. If you don’t see yourself doing anything except music, you have to be imaginative, trust your own voice, and be honest with your own voice. But I don’t know how they do double majors. I once thought about maybe getting a creative degree in writing, in literature. I wanted to write back then, and write I did.
What are your thoughts on the state of classical and/or contemporary music today?
People overall have a great sense of doom. There’s a negativity about it, but I don’t see it. I think things are complicated in many ways, but music is booming, and I love that. Borders are being erased between genres. I find it delightful to collaborate with jazz musicians. Billy Childs wrote a piece for me.
It’s the same with Clarice Assad’s Lilith Concerto, which I just performed at the National Gallery of Art [in March]. I think this concerto is going to be a classic. The fact that this is happening now seems so natural. I hope there will be more of that and more opportunities to perform.
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.
Television news story from Chicago Tonight – WTTW, about Inna’s connection to Chicago, her career, the Memorial concert for her mom, and much more. Click here or on image below:
• Inna Faliks’ book, the musical memoir Weight in the Fingertips, will be published in 2023 by Globe Pequot.
• Inna was recently profiled in a Cleveland Classical feature by Jarrett Hoffman titled “The Story of a Pianist” —Ukrainian-born Inna Faliks on her monologue-recital & her home country”. You can read the article by clicking here.
• More performances on the horizon! Be sure to check the calendar for upcoming dates.
• On Sunday, January 16 at 8 pm EST, Inna Falik’s performance of Pursuit by Billy Childs will be featured on Modern Notebook on WSMR-FM. Tune in online here.
• Jed Distler devoted an hour-long episode of his award-winning radio program, Between the Keys to Inna Faliks, including an in-depth interview. The program aired on WWFM radio on January 11 and 12, and is available on demand at this link.
• Also on WWFM, Inna Faliks’s extensive, two-part interview with WWFM’s Cadenza host David Osenberg is available on-demand. Listen to Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
