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

Javier Ronceros of NoHoArtsDistrict.com

“Inna Faliks at the piano was mesmerizing and valorous. I come for her brilliance, but I stay for the revelation she gives to the pieces… Together, these two are sublime.”

Faliks•Cani Piano & Violin Duo

https://www.independent.com/2023/04/21/on-the-beat-of-beethoven-and-boleros-the-weekend-that-was/

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

by Christopher Axworthy

Review of Reimagine: Beethoven & Ravel performance,
from coverage of Cremona Musica festival

I was heading to hear Inna Faliks in ‘Reimagine Ravel’ , intrigued by the title,having studied myself with Vlado Perlemuter who had been coached by the composer himself for first performances in the ’20’s. It was indeed a fascinating story she had to tell of building bridges past and present, looking to the future.

Reimagine: Beethoven & Ravel — 9 World Premieres finds Inna breaking new ground, paying a respectful homage to source material by Beethoven and Ravel. The album was released by Navona records last June .Featuring nine contemporary composers, including Richard Danielpour, Paola Prestini, Billy Childs, and Timo Andres, who were commissioned to craft responses to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Bagatelles, op. 126 (incidentally, the master’s favorite) as well as Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit.

The results are exhilarating, not least owing to Faliks’ stunningly precise and sensitive pianistic interpretation: the Ukrainian-born American pianist ties together Classical, Romantic and modern pieces with disarming nonchalance and rock-solid technical skill. Defying the challenge of uniting three centuries of musical styles and social commentary, as well as producing an album during a global pandemic with the help of Yamaha’s Disklavier technology, Reimagine proudly raises a 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.

[A] fascinating project that saw Paola Prestini inspired by the fluidity of Ondine, the water nymph. This was followed by Timo Andres inspired by Ravel’s depiction of the gallows with a minimal piece of Philip Glass proportions incorporating a quote from Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit with Afro Americans hanging from the branches of a Becket type tree. Billy Childs’ an Afro American jazz pianist and composer inspired by Scarbo by a black man being chased by the police. Some very fine fully committed playing from Inna Faliks and knowing the background made it a truly fascinating mirror on this very well known suite by Ravel.

It was though her stunning performance of the full original suite that won the day. A ravishing performance of Ondine and a fascinating one of Le Gibet in which her pointed bass notes gave a fluidity and luminosity to the bleak repeated bell. Scarbo too was a revelation for the clarity of detail especially in the left hand figurations and of course her scintillating fearless playing of a piece that Ravel wrote specifically to outdo Islamey for transcendental difficulty.

A fascinating performer.

by Susan Hall

Inna Faliks Returns to The Barge:
Splendid Music by Freidlin. Clara Schumann and Ravel

“A pianist of the highest order. … Faliks interprets like a conductor. … Faliks is such a consummate technician, that [Gaspard de la Nuit‘s] difficulty is never perceived. Instead we are led through pyrotechnics, always performed in service of the music.”

by Stephen Martorella

Fantaisie and Monologue in Newport

“For Faliks, music is about more than just playing it, which she does exquisitely. … Executed most beautifully, gracefully sweeping through its musical landscapes with eloquence, passion, and sensitivity. … Dazzling and scintillating performance. … Her amazing technique is matched by a deep and reverent musicality, passionate and inspiring, living up to her desire to be “more than…” … Inna Faliks is a personality who deserves to be explored and savored over a long period of time.”

by Mark Swed

Commentary: What is Ukrainian music, and what does it say about the war?

The first week of May, I attended four concerts. All four, whether by chance or intent, had a connection with Ukraine. That was obvious the first day of May at a benefit concert for Ukraine put on by the Wende Museum and Jacaranda Music at the Robert Frost Auditorium in Culver City. And while Ukrainian American pianist Inna Faliks’ Ukraine-centric recital several days later at the Wende contained no Ukrainian music, its programmatic theme was “The Master and Margarita,” a novel by the Ukraine-born author Mikhail Bulgakov.

At her Wende recital earlier this month, Faliks premiered Veronika Krausas’ “Master & Margarita” Suite, written for the occasion. In the Russian novel, the devil visits and wreaks marvelous havoc on Soviet Moscow. In her suite of seven sly dances, Krausas, who is a Canadian American Los Angeles composer of Lithuanian heritage, lightly waltzes around and toys with fanciful passages from Bulgakov’s novel. As with Silvestrov, what isn’t there is as intriguing as what is. Each dance is a kind of fantasy, full of musical hints. Crossing borders is, and has always been, the way of music.

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.

Full Review

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.

Full Review