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

 

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

Feature on Reimagine – Nine World Premieres

Interview with Piano Street Magazine with Patrick Jovell
from coverage of Cremona Musica festival

Pianist Inna Faliks’ project “Reimagine – Nine World Premieres” includes composers’ responses to Beethoven’s late Op. 126 Bagatelles as well as Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. Piano Street enjoyed her performance at the Cremona Musica and got the opportunity to talk to her about her ambitions project.

At Cremona Musica’s Piano Experience last fall, one half of Ukranian-American pianist Inna Faliks’ project “Reimagine – Nine World Premieres”, was brought to an international audience. This second half called; “Reimagining Gaspard de la nuit” brought more than Faliks’ impressive rendition of original composition though. We heard three commissioned composers’ reactions on Ravel’s work through their own compositions. Aesthetically, very different in styles.

The whole project, which Faliks has performed worldwide, also includes composers’ responses to Beethoven’s late Op. 126 Bagatelles, and the whole exciting enterprise can be enjoyed on Falik’s album released for the Navona label in 2021. So, in whole, nine contemporary composers, including Richard Danielpour, Paola Prestini, Billy Childs, and Timo Andres, were commissioned to craft responses to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Bagatelles, op. 126 as well as Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. According to critics the results are exhilarating, not least owing to Faliks’ stunningly precise and sensitive pianistic interpretations. Inna Faliks manages to unite three centuries of musical styles and social commentary, as well as producing an album monument not only to the genius of Beethoven and Ravel, but also to the perseverance and verve of some of today’s most exciting and important composers.

Patrick Jovell: Thank you for your lovely performance of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit at Cremona Musica. Can you tell me the background of this whole ”re-imagining idea”?

Inna Faliks: The idea was to create a bridge between past and present. The Beethoven Bagatelles Op. 126 are forward looking, experimental, transcendent but also humorous and simple. For me, programming new music is hugely important, and a better way to present it to a larger audience is to invite them to connect to something they already know, and then listen beyond it. So I asked 6 friends, wonderful composers of jazz, film, contemporary classical music etc., to pick a bagatelle and use it as a starting point. My idea was to build this bridge between the past, present and future. I continued by asking 3 of the best known American composers – jazz star and composer Billy Childs, Timo Andres and Paola Prestini – to respond to Gaspard de la nuit, a work I recorded in 2008 on my first commercial record on MSR called Sound of Verse, and one I perform frequently. This work in itself was a response to poetry – so the project becomes almost Meta here. What I got were three significant, large new works for the piano.

PJ: The project has enabled you to work closely with a number of composers. I guess composers in general are more or less familiar with the piano. What can you tell us about these multifaceted and varied personal collaborations?

IF: Each of the collaborations was unique in character. Each of the composers is either a personal friend, colleague or somebody I have known and respected and was interested in working with.
Richard Danielpour is a very frequently programmed and performed composer, and he writes magnificently for the piano. He is my colleague at UCLA – we are close as I was premiering his Bagatelle cycle. The Bagatelle he wrote for me for Reimagine Beethoven and Ravel was actually part of this cycle – and I performed it at the Wallis in Beverly Hills, a prestigious and beautiful Los Angeles theater, alongside with Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes. We became close while I was playing these for him and I am in fact playing another premiere of his; something akin to “Kinderszenen” – this May. I look forward to playing this, and many more works of his. His writing is sensuous, dramatic, technically very effective and demanding but – as very fine piano writing often is – stays very pianistic.

Tamir Hendelman is a jazz pianist and also a good friend – responding to the 2nd Bagatelle for him was fun as it is almost like an improv that spins out. It was a give and take process, definitely – and I am very happy with the energy of this piece.

Mark Carlson’s voice is very tender, heart on the sleeve, very beautiful – and beloved, because it is so sincere. His Bagatelle has received so much responses – it has truly magical colors. So often composers are afraid to write music that is “beautiful” – this piece shows how magical that can be when it truly comes from the soul. I always felt that I can be very very free with this piece, and that’s what made him most happy.

David Lefkowitz is the head of theory at UCLA, and was actually the most demanding in terms of how the piece needs to flow. I really appreciated this – because it is very complex, and haunting.

Peter Golub’s Bagatelle is wonderful as the first piece. It’s quirky and feels to me as though the original Bagatelle is looking into the mirror and seeing something very funky, as though the mirror breaks, or the light shifts. Peter is a film composer, and has very clear moments of action and suspense in his Bagatelle, I think.

Ian Krouse’s piece is the most difficult – it’s really a huge virtuoso showpiece, with an insane fugal section that repeats differently each time, without a pattern, and a transcendent contrasting section, just as in the 4th Bagatelle. This was the hardest piece, physically – its toccata-like intensity and changing patterns require lots of work. Ian was always very gracious – and forgiving, in terms of some very prestissississimo tempi! But I like to take it fast, and the recording succeeds I think.

Now for the Ravel pieces. The most “in-person” collaboration was with my dear friend Billy Childs, because he lives in Los Angeles. That was also the most challenging one. Billy’s piece is truly brilliant, a virtuoso masterwork – and it refers to a Black man running from the police, as it was composed shortly after the George Floyd murder. It will be the first piece in a suite that Billy is writing for me, called “Freedom Suite”. There are sections in the piece that are inspired by Herbie Hancock. I would play it for Billy, and he would always tell me that I am playing those sections “too beautifully”, with a natural rubato, but he wants them as steady and direct and almost “ugly” – so that was a challenge, to find a balance. Billy’s harmonies are incredibly luscious. Ravel is his favorite composer. It’s hard not to make those harmonies sensuous! I just can’t help it sometimes.

Timo Andres’ piece has its own difficulties. It’s a huge minimalist work that grows in intensity. It may not sound like it, but it is hugely challenging because there are no patterns at all. It needs enormous restraint and stamina. Sometimes, I would be tempted to allow a climax to happen way before it needs to, to use more pedal – but it needs restraint.

Paola Prestini’s piece was very natural to play, just so colorful and so fitting to Ondine. We worked out various rhythmic details – the piece is written meticulously, even if it sounds very natural and sometimes almost improvised.

In the Ravel response cycle, each piece really can stand on its own. They are fantastic additions to the piano repertoire, and I am very proud to premiere them and to be the dedicatee for them.

PJ: Thank you for providing your personal reflections about the works of your collaborators. Such a project states the eternal qualities of art creation mirroring a process how contemporary expression is made possible through reflections and references to the past. In the old days the pianist and composer was the very same person. The modern performer though is trained to interpret only. As a university teacher, how are your thoughts on composition and improvisation for that sake, among young performers heading for a professional career?

IF: First of all, I am a performer through and through, and this is why I have a fresh outlook on teaching. I believe the two things cannot be separated.
Now about improvisation – every performance needs to have an element of improvising, of spontaneity. Imagination, honesty of musicianshiip and music making that comes from the heart are the things, in my view, that distinguish a real artist. In my view, composition and improvisation are an integral part of a musician’s world and should be experienced by every child from the start and be part of tbeir vocabulary. I started out as a composer. At 9, I composed an opera that was performed in Odesa. I had lots of piano music, cello, voice music- I studied composition seriously but then the piano took over. My many projects , I believe, are the way I express that part.
When I performed Rzewski ‘s People United, my favorite part was the long improvisation at the end… and somehow that restarted something. I am beginning to compose again.
I recently revised a few short pieces I carried with me through immigration. They will be a “Ukrainian Childrens Suite”. Also, I may be composing for a project of responses to Schoenberg’s op 11, one of my next things.

 

Reimagine! – Contemporary Piano Pieces with Inspiration from the Past

 

Review of Polonaise-Fantasie: The Story of a Pianist

by Christopher Axworthy

Review of Polonaise Fantasy: The Story of a Pianist
JW3 in London

Inna Falik’s Love of Life – The extraordinary story of a great artist told with mastery, intelligence and beauty

Inna Faliks in London to play for the first time in the JE3 Arts centre.
Telling her story of growing up in Odessa under the Soviet regime and even playing on the red piano in the room allocated to her family.
A three room appartment allocated to seven people!
Immigration was the word used in 1988 when the family prepared to flee to a freer life in the USA.
Now head of piano at UCLA in Los Angeles she came to London to share her story with us.

Eloquent as a poet but above all an eloquence in music that is so immediate and simple as every note touched places that other musicians can rarely reach.

A first half opening with Shchedrin’s athletic Basso Ostinato. Like a tiger being let out of cage as Inna ravaged this magnificent Yamaha piano with devilish glee .A ‘coup du theatre’ indeed after which we needed the calm aristocratic sounds of Bach’s knotty twine.
Jan Freidlin’s Ballade in Black and White was composed for Inna who gave its premiere in 2011 in Carnegie Hall.It was played with a clarity and total conviction that was enthralling.
After Bach it was Mozart to calm the air now with a performance of his D minor Fantasy of great simplicity and beauty.
The ‘Maiden’s Wish’ was played with wondrous jeux perlé in the style of the pianists of another age, that of pure gold.Scintillating exuberance and aristocratic style made one wonder why this little gem has been so rarely heard in the concert hall since the grandiloquence of Arrau.

Following with the most famous of showpieces :’ La Campanella’.Paganini and Liszt in cahoots to beguile and seduce with seemingly impossible pianistic gymnastics.
Inna played it with amazing clarity and insinuating charm with a kaleidoscope of colours that made this old war horse shine as new.
Streams of gold and silver sounds were thrown off with an ease and precision that were breathtaking in their audacity.
The mighty Polonaise Fantasie, from which this moving tale takes its name, was played with aristocratic style and ravishing beauty.
There was an architectural shape of such intelligence that restored this work to the Olympian heights of beauty and originality penned at the end of Chopin’s all too short life.It gave great meaning to a work that can sometimes ,in lesser hands, appear simply fragmented and structurally weak.
Inna showed us the revolutionary originality of the form that is free but in a highly original frame where Chopin’s genius shines through every bar.
Inna had realised this as she saw in this masterpiece a road plan of her own extraordinary life.

The most moving part was to come, both in words and in music, as Inna described the reappearance of Mischa Shpigelmacher in her life.
Out of the blue an old schoolboy friend suddenly appears at her concerts. A spark is felt as she decides to turn down a sumptuous after concert supper and to flee to Paris with Mr Shpigelmacher becoming fast best friends and an obvious kindred spirit for life.
Now happily married with two teenage children Mr and Mrs Shpigelmacher are still best friends and enjoying together this moving celebration of love in London.

What better music could there be than Beethoven’s op 126 Bagatelles.
Ravishing beauty and quixotic changes of character they were played with the true mastery of someone who listens to the sounds she is creating.
A purity of sound with a fluidity where bar lines seemed not to exist .Even Beethoven’s precise pedal makings in the third were translated into the magical disintegration of the melodic line.A magic disappearing trick interpreted as Beethoven obviously intended.
It contrasted with the ferocious fourth that in turn dissolves into a bagpipe drone on which a fragmented melodic line is allowed to float as if suspended in air.
The purity of the melodic line in the fifth was a lesson in how to let the composers words speak for themselves without any personal intervention from the mere performer.
‘Je sens,je joue,je trasmets’.
The tornado that is unleashed in the sixth broke the spell but created another even more mysterious cloud of sounds where mere words have no place.
Like in the last great trilogy of Sonatas, in particular op 111, the fragments of melody were floated on a bass pedal note like puffs of smoke that Beethoven could see with the vision of the paradise that awaits.
With subtle intelligence and scholarship she could turn these baubles into gems.
Penned in the last moments of Beethoven’s life when he could find the serenity that had eluded him all his life.

Inna imbued them with the same love that she communicated so movingly in this personal story.One that has become even more poignant for the events that are unfolding with disturbing intensity in her homeland where her soul still abides.
Dedicating the performance to her family:her parents,Irene and Simon Faliks who were brave enough to leave the USSR when they did.
Her husband and best friend, then and now, Misha Shpigelmacher. Her two children,Nathaniel and Frida ,as well as to anyone who has ever left a place in search of a better life.
If music be the food of love, play on!

What a story!
Simple great music pouring from a sensitive soul as she communicates the remarkable adventure that is her life.
Fragments pieced together on a constant bass undercurrent which is love itself.
No greater story could there be than this extraordinary ‘Love of life’.

No surprise that I had first heard and met Inna here in the city of dreams :https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/09/26/cremona-the-city-of-dreams-a-global-network-where-dreams-become-reality/

 

  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