Review of Inna’s performance at NYC’s Bargemusic Here and Now Winter Festival

by Henry Rolnick

Whew!!! No other words describe it.

Stunning performance by Inna Faliks … a BargeMusic concert which whirled away from its hour-plus duration to a minute-to-minute revelation.

The last two works showed two miracles: First was the Pursuit (in response to “Scarbo”) by Billy Childs.
Mr. Childs’ piece was unfamiliar. The familiar miracle was Ms. Faliks. She succeed with digital faultlessness in Ravel’s original.

Ravel wrote [“Scarbo”] the year of Einstein’s great time/space discovery, yet Ms. Faliks turned his pre-quantum mechanics into a personal cosmic journey of hide-and-seek shadows and blazing light, a cosmic chase and a moonlit nightmare.

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Review of Inna’s performance at NYC’s Bargemusic Here and Now Winter Festival

by Susan Hall

Inna Faliks is a superb concert pianist, who also heads the piano studies department at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her recordings are devoted to revealing kindred spirits. … You too can be a kindred spirit.

Husband and wife, Robert and Clara Schumann, are offered together in The Schumann Project. Faliks has kept the composers’ magical, whimsical, heart-felt language central to her repertoire. … Her appreciation for Clara’s individual voice is clear in her recording of the Piano Sonata in G Minor. [Clara Schumann’s] Etudes move from dark to ebullient. Faliks places them where she feels they speak most powerfully and dramatically.

For the recording [Reimagine: Beethoven and Ravel, Faliks] asked a group of contemporary composers to respond to Beethoven’s Bagatelles, his last work for piano and also Ravel’s notoriously challenging Gaspard de la Nuit. Worth listening.

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by James Harrington

“Best Of” list, Fanfare: for Reimagine Beethoven and Ravel, and Bargemusic recital

Inna Faliks told me when I wrote my original review last September that she hoped to be in New York City to play her Reimagine program. I ended that review saying, “You can be
sure that I will be there.”

I was there—on a cold December night—and she played exceptionally well at Bargemusic, a unique floating concert hall below the Brooklyn Bridge. With the Manhattan night skyline in the window behind her, we all bobbed up and down a little with the waves and heard the pieces on this program. She began with a world premiere of Voices, a work by Ljova for historical recordings and piano, followed by the Reimagine pieces and topped off with Ravel’s Scarbo.

There is no question that she is one of the best and most creative American pianists these days.

by Ben Kutner

“Pianist Inna Faliks gave the convincing world premiere of composer Richard Danielpour’s Eleven Bagatelles for the Piano along with a program of Chopin and Schumann, Sunday night at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. A concert pianist has the task of maintaining momentum throughout an evening of solo works, and Faliks delivered.”

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by CP Wren

Guest pianist, Inna Faliks, and members of the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra, violinist Roberto Cani and cellist John Walz took the stage and deftly swooped Barrett Hall into an intensely animated and tension filled performance. Inna Faliks plays with a kind of expression one could imagine of a highly accomplished jazz artist. But this was chamber music. She entertained with humor, delivering a rollicking performance using her expressive facial gestures and playful spacial flourishes above the keys. With her tautly moving, driving force, she balanced the hall on tiptoe, her antics often directed at violinist Cani, who played the “straight man” throughout the spiraling progression of Piano Trio No. 1.

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by David J. Brown

Ferocious and torrential, firmly establish[ing] her virtuoso credentials. Her playing [is] engagingly impulsive and improvisatory, skillfully observing turn-on-a-dime contrasts. [Faliks’s fingers are] positively diamond-tipped.

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