Q&A: Piano professor shares how Soviet Union background influences her music

See below for an excerpt from Susana Alcantar of The Daily Bruin’s recent Q&A with Inna, detailing the pianist’s experience with Frederic Rzewski’s protest piece “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!”:

DB: Could you explain the context of “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!”

IF: As all great pieces of music, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” is a lifetime kind of piece, a work that stays and evolves with an artist for many, many years. I find it to be a piece that is at once incredibly, mathematically and masterfully structured, and improvisatory in scope, expression and flair.

Read the full article here.

Reviews from the Ravinia Festival and more!

Reviews from Inna’s recent performances at the Ravinia Festival, with Camerata Pacifica, and at the Newport Festival:

“With Faliks in the lead, the prickly Scherzo and huge, dramatic Finale fully reflected Mahler’s mighty voice. Faliks is a poetic pianist, unafraid to linger over a short pause or craft a melodic fragment to explode and fade with blinding speed. But especially in the transcription’s fast-paced final movements she never lost the singing-through line so crucial to navigating Mahler’s often chaotic universe. The Scherzo’s staccato, martial rhythms could be crisply stern but also piquant and witty. Its lyrical moments glowed, thanks to Falik’s pliant, flexible melody lines.”

Classical Voice North America, September 2017

“…it was Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks who blew the other two pianists out of the water with her enthralling account of Opus 111, the last of the three sonatas and one of Beethoven’s most stunning creations, as he ends a lifetime of sonatas with a few shimmering scale passages and a hushed C Major chord.

“This amazing score was clearly in her DNA, as Faliks charged into the brooding introduction when we all thought she was adjusting the piano bench. And from there she had the audience hanging on every note.

…this was one of the most moving performance I’ve ever heard of Opus 111, a work whose stormy opening gives way to a great hymn to humanity.”

Providence Journal (Newport Music Festival), July 2017

“Huang and Aznavoorian returned after intermission with pianist Inna Faliks for a triumphant rendering of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67.
For the Camerata players to evoke emotion while excavating Shostakovich’s sharper vocabulary of musical images, figures, and gestures was remarkable. . Faliks’ mash-up of sensitivity and pure fury brought a heightened relevance to this rarely performed, beautifully complex stunner. A simplyenthralling performance!
Prokofiev Flute Sonata… The emotion came from Faliks, whose expressive, spirited, curious interactions brought life to even the conventional accompaniment patterns of the four-movement piece.

Stage and Cinema, September 2017

More from Newport Music Festival and Music in the Mountains

Here are two lovely preview articles from some of last month’s engagements!

First, a personal essay I wrote about my new recording, “Polonaise-Fantasie, Story of a Pianist,” for the Newport Music Festival:

I know that I am the artist that I am now, partially thanks to growing up in the Odessa of the past – seven people in a three-room apartment, surrounded by books, music, ideas and friends (one of whom is Misha. You will meet him in the story. He is my husband and the father of my two children).

Recording this story, and this music, is the most personal project I have ever done.

Full article here.

Second, here’s a nice article on my appearance at the Music in the Mountains Festival in Durango:

The Ukranian-born pianist has played in our festival before, so she knows the territory and the drill. If you want a sneak peek, there will be an open rehearsal from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday at the Festival Tent. You can also see and hear Faliks play a number of different works on YouTube. Calm, elegant and self-possessed, she’s a marvelous musician whom critics have described as playing with “grace and raw power.”

Faliks has had a distinguished concert and recording career. She’s also professor of piano and head of keyboard studies at the UCLA Department of Music, which frees her to concertize at summer festivals all over the world, including ours.

Full article here.

Newport Music Festival

It was lovely to return to the Newport Music Festival for a week of intense and magical music-making. Here’s an excerpt from the Providence Journal’s review of my performance of Beethoven Opus 111.

“…it was Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks who blew the other two pianists out of the water with her enthralling account of Opus 111, the last of the three sonatas and one of Beethoven’s most stunning creations, as he ends a lifetime of sonatas with a few shimmering scale passages and a hushed C Major chord.

“This amazing score was clearly in her DNA, as Faliks charged into the brooding introduction when we all thought she was adjusting the piano bench. And from there she had the audience hanging on every note.

…this was one of the most moving performance I’ve ever heard of Opus 111, a work whose stormy opening gives way to a great hymn to humanity.”

(Newport Music Festival), July 2017

Spring News

Dear Friends,

Happy Spring!

It is with boundless excitement that I share with you the flurry of upcoming premieres and performances this spring, and look forward to a thrilling summer. Join me for concerts in Chicago, New Haven, NYC, Los Angeles, Music/Words with the Poetry Foundation, as well as the brand new Dialogues Festival at UCLA, featuring at least 20 world premieres.

These lead into great summer appearances—my return to Newport Festival, concerto with the wonderful orchestra at Music in the Mountains Festival, and my Ravinia Festival debut, which heralds an exciting 17-18 season.

degas dancers
Inna Faliks performing Music/Words at the Getty, in celebration of Degas’s Russian Dancers

April 7—Chicago, IL
12pm: WFMT Live Broadcast @ Pianoforte Chicago
6pm: Recital @ Pianoforte Chicago

April 9—New Haven, CT
3 pm: Recital @ Lyric Hall (Impromptu Classical Series)

*World Premieres by Drozdoff, plus music of Schubert, Freidlin, Takemitsu

April 11—New York, NY
7:30pm: Recital @ Hunter College, Ida Lang Hall (Impromptu Classical Series)

April 12—New York, NY
6:00pm: Recital @ Yamaha Artist Services (6@6 Series)

May 2—Los Angeles, CA
7:30pm: Inna Faliks & Friends at UCLA @ Schoenberg Hall, UCLA

*Solo and chamber music, including Shostakovich Quintet with faculty and alumni. If you missed this in March, here is your chance to hear it again!

May 27—Chicago, IL
7:00pm, Music/Words @ The Poetry Foundation

May 29—Chicago, IL
8:00pm: Live Recital Series on WFMT Chicago Classical Radio

June 1,2,3—Los Angeles, CA
7:30 pm: Dialogues Festival at UCLA @ Ostin Recording Studio

*I am thrilled to put together this festival, where at least sixteen world premieres will be unveiled! Celebrating the link between past and present, this festival explores new music composed in response to Beethoven, Ravel, Schumann, by composers such as Richard Danielpour, Timo Andres, Tamir Hendelman, Ian Krouse, Paola Prestini, and more. The Dialogues Festival also juxtaposes works by Richard Danielpour and Chopin, and presents new compositions by UCLA student composers in response to Bach’s Aria from the Goldberg Variations. Featuring: Inna Faliks (piano), David Kaplan (piano), UCLA piano students, and UCLA composition students.

I look forward to seeing you and hearing from you this spring!.

warmest regards,
Inna

Winter Newsletter

20161209_190759

Dear Friends,

Happy 2017!

The year is off to a galloping start, after the whirlwind of fall and early winter.

I returned from a tour of China’s major halls, all architectural and acoustic masterpieces, including the Beijing Center for Performing Arts, the Shanghai Oriental Arts Theater, Tianjin Grand Theater, and more (pictures below)!

I enjoyed my debut with the fantastic group Camerata Pacifica, a collaboration with Bodytraffic modern dance (described as “electrifying and energizing” by the LA Times), and right after that, a very moving experience: playing Beethoven 3rd Concerto on my home turf, with UCLA Philharmonia and Neal Stulberg. You can see the video here.

For another chance to hear this piece, come to the February 19th concert with Peninsula Symphony, and Gary Berkson, details below.

Immediately after the New Year, I completed my forthcoming 2-disc set for Delos, “Polonaise Fantasie, Story of a Pianist”, a monologue-recital of my essays, read by actress-par-excellence Rebecca Mozo, with music ranging from Bach to Chopin to Carter to Birtwistle. Look out for a 2017 release!

Here a some upcoming winter dates to share with you—please come to these if you can, and keep in touch!

January 29
Inna plays Wanderer
LACMA, Sundays Live, 6 pm – recital and livestream.
http://www.lacma.org/event/inna-faliks-4

February 19th
Beethoven 3rd, Peninsula Symphony
Gary Berkson, conductor
http://www.pensym.org/

March 4th
Music/Words at the Getty, in celebration of Degas’s Russian Dancers
http://www.getty.edu/visit/cal/events/ev_1438.html

March 19th
Dilijan Series (Lark Music Society), Zipper Hall
Schostakovich Trio and Quintet
Some of my most beloved chamber music works, with my esteemed colleagues Movses Pogossian, Antonio Lysy, and others.
More information here

May this year be filled with hope, beauty and music for you all.

Warmest,
Inna

 

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Two Breathtaking Concerts in North Carolina

Check out these rave reviews from Inna’s concert and recital at the University of North Carolina earlier this month:

“Inna Faliks’ performance was anything but routine. She had more than enough upper body strength to hold her own against the composer’s full, plush orchestration. The highlight of her performance was the wonderful intimate chamber music quality her performance of the nocturne-like second movement with its dialogue between keyboard and woodwinds. There was no want of bravura in the finale.”

CVNC, May 2016

“Faliks kept listeners in open mouth wonder with her seemingly magical keyboard wizardry. From my seat I could not see the abundance of crossed hands listeners were commenting about as they left after her repeated curtain calls. Her palette of refined color, dynamics, and tone were breathtaking.”

CVNC, May 2016

Inna Faliks Elevates Classical Piano With Prose

Check out 27east‘s new profile of Inna Faliks and Music/Words:

A classical pianist’s work is often very lonely, Inna Faliks says. It is not nearly as social as string orchestras, or even quartets, nor as open to variation without wearing the label of “avant-garde” for an audience that is succinctly niche.

Yet when the Ukrainian-born musician began melding her art with spoken word by both well-known and up-and-coming poets, she created her own form of expression that is not only original but also approachable.

Ms. Faliks calls it “Music/Words”—and she is the “Speaking Pianist,” as well as a professor and a mother.

“I don’t think so much about tradition anymore. I think of myself as a powerful pianist,” explains Ms. Faliks, who will return to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Friday to play a concert, as part of the Salon Series. “I don’t have any borders. There is nothing that I look at and say, ‘That’s too difficult.’”

Read the full article here!

Peninsula Reviews

by Richard Lynde

Inna Faliks began the “Music/Words” series in New York, and with her recent relocation as head of the Herb Alpert Piano Department at UCLA, has continued this unique and memorable practice to our state and county. In Ellen Bass, she could not have picked a better partner. Our poet said that for her this new way of thinking about music is “a conversation.” It began with her quiet reading of “Relax,” about bad things that will happen, such as fungus on tomatoes, cats run over, even a lesbian wife, all stated with a wry humor: like those to follow, what she called “talking poems” meant to be read aloud, something she is very good at. Faliks then took to the keyboard in Schedrin’s (b. 1932) “Basso Ostinato,” a blizzard of sound that was wild, fast, jazzy like Gershwin and reflective of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, a tour de force with underlying humor and perfect control.

Then Ellen Bass read again, this time, “Jazz,” about sending her poems out into the world as if a child, a modern take on our great 17th century American Ann Bradstreet’s own similar feelings. In “Waiting for Rain” she tells how the ancient philosopher Lucretius got her through the night with his idea of atoms “combining” and “recombining” amid the void. “When you return,” magically has eggs going back to shells, “letters unwrite themselves” and diamonds to coal to rotting leaves. Amazing imagery, fresh and immediate.

Next, Inna Faliks played the Mozart (1756-91) “Fantasie in D Minor K. 397,” a brief, intensely moody departure from his sonatas, which she made startling with its shifts between the opening Andante, then Adagio than a Presto played almost too fast to hear, but with perfect accuracy to end the high mini drama. Then, in “If you know,” Bass told of ticket takers touching palms with concert goers, followed by “God’s Grief” with startling images of God, Joan of Arc, Houdini – her words as magical as his magic tricks. In “God in Trouble” a beached whale decomposes, then in “Listening” she imagines having heard Keats read his “Autumn” to a friend. To “words like wine/ I listened with my spine,” both funny and profound.

Then in a brilliant stroke for both performers and audience, Faliks departed from the printed program which had Bass reading between movements of the huge Brahms (1833-97) “Sonata No. 2 in F Sharp Minor,” written and played by the composer in 1853 when he was “only” 20 and full of storm and stress along with tenderness. In the often fiendishly difficult and architecturally perfect four-movement work, played straight through and received with tumultuous applause, the noble work was the best-performed these ears have heard on this mighty Yamaha since Yevgeny Sudbin in a big Scriabin sonata almost two years ago. The Brahms began with a huge attack blaring forth the “allegro, not too fast but with energy.” The “andante with expression” was a stroll with purpose, a meditation that becomes intense and moody, alternating playfulness with severity, then lushness – typical of Brahms, and with Faliks sitting, as usual, with her face right over the keys, as expressive as the notes she was playing. The moving Scherzo was hardly a musical “joke,” but a brief lead up to the “Finale,” played with a gripping intensity, blazing keys played flat-fingered for speed like Horowitz, then a maternal tenderness like the famous Brahms “Lullaby,” coherent in all its many moods, and ending with a big bang. All gave a standing ovation.

Then Bass read three concluding poems, ending with “Reincarnation,” not returning as the “totem of a shaman,” but rather as an OYSTER! Very funny, very apt, very original, like all of her works. Faliks then concluded the intermissionless 110-minute program, which passed as if in a dream, with Liszt’s (1811-86) “La Campanella,” a glittering whimsical bon-bon that left a grateful audience with church bells ringing in our heads.

“…in a brilliant stroke for both performers and audience, Faliks… had [Ellen] Bass reading between movements of the huge Brahms (1833-97) “Sonata No. 2 in F Sharp Minor,” written and played by the composer in 1853 when he was “only” 20 and full of storm and stress along with tenderness. In the often fiendishly difficult and architecturally perfect four-movement work, played straight through and received with tumultuous applause, the noble work was the best-performed these ears have heard on this mighty Yamaha since Yevgeny Sudbin in a big Scriabin sonata almost two years ago. The Brahms began with a huge attack blaring forth the “allegro, not too fast but with energy.” The “andante with expression” was a stroll with purpose, a meditation that becomes intense and moody, alternating playfulness with severity, then lushness – typical of Brahms, and with Faliks sitting, as usual, with her face right over the keys, as expressive as the notes she was playing. The moving Scherzo was hardly a musical “joke,” but a brief lead up to the “Finale,” played with a gripping intensity, blazing keys played flat-fingered for speed like Horowitz, then a maternal tenderness like the famous Brahms “Lullaby,” coherent in all its many moods, and ending with a big bang. All gave a standing ovation.”

Full Review

Rave reviews for Inna’s recent concerts in Chicago and Tel Aviv

“Sometimes a concert is so graceful and so unusual that it must be mentioned. … [Faliks] handled everything deftly, displaying speed and her formidable technique throughout.”

– Chicago Sun-Times, read the full review here

“Simply exquisite, with many expressive and colorful phrases played by the pianist Inna Faliks… Beethoven Fantasie is worth knowing and was also performed very well by Faliks”

-Hagai Hitron, Haaretz, review of the Arensky Piano Quintet and Beethoven Fantasie. Tel Aviv Museum, May 2014

  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