Inna Faliks: The Art of the Sublime

By Raul da Gama
Jun 29, 2024

In common parlance, the word “sublime” is an adjective meaning awe-inspiringly grand, excellent or impressive,” like the best chocolate fudge sundae you have ever had.

Perhaps, more relevant to the task at hand you might use the word to describe a spine-tingly piece of music as “a work of sublime beauty.” Replace that indefinite article with the definite article – in other words with the, the word also functions as a noun, meaning something that strikes the mind with grandeur and power.”

And thus, we arrive at the truth about the artistry of Inna Faliks. For never need a connoisseur look beyond the striking artistry of Ms Faliks to find works of great, Grecian lyricism, and spine-tingling, utterly sublime beauty.

There is no other single word, indeed no other way to approach her writing: her extraordinarily lyrical writing, both of her autobiography and the works of music that have sprung from it. There is extraordinarily eloquent poetry and intellectual value in both.

And so, we must aver that Ms any writing that Falik’s does embodies the very quintessence of nobility of character; high art, elevated in nature and style.

Ms Faliks is a musician first – a bona fide musical genius from an incredibly early age, perhaps even before even touched the keys of a piano. Like other geniuses – György Cziffra, Martha Argerich, Jimi Hendrix and so on – music must have formed in her head before she even uttered a sound and played the piano.

However, before she wrote her autobiography Weight in the Fingertips – A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage [Regardez… déjà une référence à la plus grande épopée de tous les temps: L’Odyssée d’Homè] Inna Faliks was a prodigious composer and pianist.

But remarkably there can also be little doubt that Ms Faliks lyrical prose also springs from the brilliantly exacting poetics that govern her exceptional musicianship – and, of course, her pianism – from whence her artistry streaked across the sky as “a dark-skinned and black haired… Ashkenazi Jew from Odessa.”

In fact, as a particularly vivacious child. She describes overhearing her mother, Irene Faliksthe first profound influence [also a four-year-old Ms Faliks’ first piano teacher] in her life, say to her father: “I hope that the children she meets are lively, interesting, with hobbies. I would hate for her to have to spend time with children who are… gray.”

She certainly stuck out in the playground among “[the] blond-haired and blue-eyed [children who] spat out the word Evreika [“Jew girl] at me,” she remembers, continuing “I didn’t know what that meant as I had never even heard the word Jewish yet,” she writes early in her autobiography.

This was not unusual. After all this was the era of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian was occupied. Religion was not encouraged, much less recognised. Places of worship – synagogues and churches – though not non-existent, being a holdover from Tsarist Russia, but they were dusty and desolate.

But the little Miss Faliks was treated to recitation of the poetry of Alexander Pushkin by her father Simon Faliks, especially on tram-trips to the National Music School, which had accepted the young prodigy into their program for gifted children.

The first days and weeks were inauspicious, reports Miss Faliks. She thought she would be playing the piano. Instead, she was given a pair of ornamental spoons and [presumably] asked to learn to keep time – and to make music on them instead of making music on the instrument she had watched her mother play exquisitely.

“I was flabbergasted. I was a soloist!” Such an affront writes make up my own pieces. I just needed to figure out how to play the piano! I was ready to perform on my own, all the music I had heard my mom practice – Mozart, Bach, Scriabin – and to make up my own pieces. I just needed to figure out how to play the piano! But they didn’t understand, and so for my first public appearance, I sang in the chorus and played the spoons.”

The lucid poetry of Miss Faliks’ writing shows up early in her prosody as she examines the basis of the poetic of her music – then as now. She asks herself: “What is more important for a child to learn first: sound or rhythm?”

Answering her rhetorical question with the analogy of a fistfight, she asserts: “The truth is they both hold the key to making music. Rhythm is primordial and ever present: the beating of our heart, our breath, our steps.” [the art of subtle dynamics already forming in the mind!] “I wanted to be able to touch the piano and make it sing about all the colorful landscapes and characters that traversed my mind,” she writes as if harking back to a wistful dream.

Miss Faliks puts all of her early trials behind her and soon begins to put her theories and her poetics in music to the test through the sheer audacity of her belief in herself, thanks in no small part to parents – and extended family – whose unstinting support propel her forward and upward.

The journey from “dark-skinned, dark-haired Jewish girl” internationally renowned soloist comes by way of an exquisite book equal parts gripping narrative and poetic writing that sings like proverbial Goethe lieder. The analogy should never be lost on the reader as Mis Faliks’ life.

In fact, hers is a life that unfolds – both wittingly and unwittingly – like a character caught up in the drama Faust the epic dramatic work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – or, more appropriately, a character [most obvious?] from an epic novel modeled on Goethe’s classic verse play. This is The Master and Margarita, a seminal [equally epic work] by the celebrated Ukrainian writer Mikhail Bulgakov.

The book was a constant companion of Miss Faliks throughout her life in Odessa and it is among the most prized possessions that makes its way with her to the USA, when her parents via Vienna and Rome. Here she experienced the life of a refugee. Her extraordinarily educated – who had spent a lifetime in academia – become the equivalent of all but panhandlers to supplement the handouts to refugee’s by Jewish organisations while they await papers that will allow them to emigrate to the USA.

It is a kind of Milan Kundera-meets-Mikhail Bulgakov existence for the Faliks.’ The idiomatic narrative of The Master and Margarita is further seared in the memory of the young Miss Faliks. The spy-story-like departure from Odessa gives way to a breathtaking Graham Greene-like narrative. Ms Faliks tells a compelling dramatic story throughout from Odessa to Chicago, her ultimate destination.

The bitter sweet loss of her best friend from music school, Misha Shpigelmacher [a.k.a., Shpilka] drives the pianist deeper into her music. [Spoiler alert: Shpilka and Ms Faliks are reunited almost years later and are now married for two decades, and parents to two children.] She also becomes an outrageous extrovert, led [astray] into her first [short-lived] marriage to her rich narcissistic husband, who mistreats her rather cruelly. However, miraculously throughout her ordeals she clear-eyed about her artistic objectives to penetrate the skin of music and discover the secrets which she will then turn to performances and recordings that make her one of the finest composers and pianists in the world.

Along the way she meets extraordinary teachers that she develops almost mystical relationships. Apart from such celebrated conservatories in Chicago she meets – à la G.I Gurdjieff – remarkable men and women. These were Ann Schein whose atelier she leaves to study with Leon Fleischer, and Billy Childs, another masterful tutor. Her growth at the Peabody was significant to her development. But clearly, by her own admission, other teachers had the most definitive impact on her development.

She tells us, in dramatic fashion, how two of them helped her shape her artistic sensibility. First among them was the late Emilio del Rosario – [a.k.a., Mr D], who was probably the most impactful tutor in her life. The fine tuning came by way of her discipleship with the Russian expatriate Boris Petrushansky, who studied in Moscow with Heinrich Neuhaus, the teacher to such maestros as Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and Lev Naumov, among others.

As a pianist, composer, interpreter of the classics and as a pedagogue, Miss Faliks is non pareil. Her broad range of musicological interests certainly enables her to become a more complete musician than most of her peers. Immersing herself in study and performance despite everything that life throws at her makes for a narrative as dazzling as her recorded repertoire. Remarkably the autobiography does not include an appendix with her discography. Each of the productions is recommended listening for the discerning connoisseur. So, online resources must suffice.

Whenever the autobiography threatens to become a litany of which works of music were played when and where, Miss Faliks diverts us with masterly use of poetic writing and tremendously beauteous imagism. This book abounds in such masterful writing, so this perhaps rather long one might suffice to exemplify the fact that the pianist is also a magnificent, poetic writer:

“I first encountered Scarbo much earlier when Mr D assigned it to me. Mom seemed terrified: ‘Should Inna really play this? It’s the hardest thing written for the piano!’ I looked at the shiny, new Dover edition of the score. Lots of busy pedal markings and repeated notes, a gazillion sharps and flats, and wild dynamics, from whole pages of ppp [pianississimo: really, really soft] to fff [fortississimo: really, really loud]. Some pages looked like black-and-white abstract paintings because of the sheer volume of notes. It would take for her to learn, but I loved the challenge… ‘She can do it’ Mr D said. ‘Let me write in some fingerings.’…

“Scarbo, along with Ondine and Le Gibet, is one-third of Ravel’s 1908 triptych Gaspard de la Nuit – one of the great impressionist masterpieces of music and one of the most notoriously unplayable piano suites ever written. Each of the three pieces depicts a nightmarish, ghoulish character. Scarbo is an imp who hides under your bed; frightens you at night; and, like a candle, is extinguished before morning.

“The piece opens with an ominous repeated not, played quickly. Some pianists choose to play it with one finger – I change between thumb and second finger, alternating at breakneck speed, like a trill on one note. The effect is an eerie, otherworldly vibrato. The piece can be played like the insane bravura storm that it is, but I think it’s crucial to think of Scarbo as an actual character, with thoughts and feelings. Who is he? Is he evil? Is he lonely? Is he, perhaps, sad?

“Scarbo’s motif is one of the saddest melodies Ravel ever wrote. Paying attention to this might reveal that Scarbo is despised, misunderstood, and lonely. Approaching the work with sympathy for him makes for a quite different performance than just playing the notes cleanly and quickly, with wrath and virtuosity. The momentum of the piece, with its jazzy harmonies, macabre dances, and Spanish rhythmic underpinnings [Ravel was part Basque], culminates in two massive climaxes, gigantic chords crashing and obliterating all that came before. From echoing remains of these chords, the repeated note quivers begin again until it is snuffed out.” [Interlude, page 110, Maurice Ravel, Billy Childs]

It is one’s considered observation that no one – not even Martha Argerich, whose Gaspard de la Nuit is among the greatest ever interpretations of the work – could describe the work in this manner and then play it or play it and then describe as she played it. But as one can see Miss Faliks does, and she does so on numerous occasions throughout the book. Even the mundane can be poetic with her pen”

“The next morning, as the sun shone as if it had never gone to bed – just like us. A rickety little bus jauntily bobbed up and down the hills, taking us to the Rakvere outdoor festival. At every bump in the road, we doubled over with nausea.” [Chapter 7, page 130, Rapsody in Blue, Russian Style]

Miss Faliks always hit her stride and would be at the top of her game once she sat at the piano and began to play, even during whirlwind tours and this book provides plenty of anecdotal evidence. There can be little doubt that this is true. For anyone who has been to her recitals will testify to this. Her performances – and indeed her recordings – leaves us in no doubt about her musical charisma.

What this book does is create a sense that her artistry has prismatic dimensions. She spent enough time in Soviet-occupied Ukraine, studying in a system that encouraged high literacy, and when one such as Miss Faliks displayed an extraordinary gift for music she was able to be admitted into a school for children who displayed Mensa qualities. Having a foundational education in the Russian system os music also helped pre-mold her genius.

She is more than merely literate – she comes across as being a sort of amplified litterateur as well. Her deep immersion in Ukrainian and Russian poetry at an early age [encouraged by her father] clearly enabled her to plunge into Mr Bulgakov’s epic work with great discernment. Reading Weight in the Fingertips one might often get the impression that she has emerged from the novel with elements his characters, something that is brought to fruition in the recording Manuscripts Don’t Burn [see review below], released around the same time as her autobiography.

Both the book – laced with seductive, poetic imagery – and the recording show Ms Faliks to be a sublime artist whose time has come. Seldom [if at all] does one come across an artist today as gifted in the art of poetry, prose and music. Indeed, she seems to be made completely of poetry and music. She is, in a manner of speaking, the very quintessence of art, who seems to embody the inspirational words attributed to the great German composer Ludwig van Beethoven, who said:

“Don’t just practice your art but force your way into its secrets. For it and knowledge can raise men to The Divine.” In response to which we must add, with audacity appropriate to whom we speak: “Mien leib Herr Ludwig van Beethoven, mögen Sie auch überzeugt sein, dass das Klavierspiel von Fraulien Faliks sie in die Göttlichkeit erhoben hat!”

Inna Faliks: Manuscripts Don’t Burn Seldom does a recitation and solo piano programme such as this hang together so perfectly, each successive work tightening the ratchet of intensity – from the opening Master and Margarita Suite for Speaking Pianist – towards the final, somewhat despairing and pertinently contemporary anguish of Hero. It helps that once again Inna Faliks is at the top of her communicative powers. The California-based Miss Faliks makes light work of the allegorical tome, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. With deft virtuosity that comes from being a skilled and highly lyrical writer herself, she is up to the task of working through the technical challenges of Mr Bulgakov’s book. Her recitation, beautifully articulated, soft, charming little lisp included.

Thus, in the opening Suite she produces a tight and sweet unity of purpose between words and music, providing just enough pianistic support when her spoken words are to the fore. Together, of course – piano and voice bring Miss Faliks’ full emotional range to the disc’s largest work. Cast in seven accessible movements, based on baroque dances, the work’s energetic outer movements neatly enfold inner, slower movements of scintillating warmth and beauty. The middle movements – Yellow Flower Waltz and Fantasia – are by turns rapturously lyrical, sparkling and luscious.

The title work – Manuscripts Don’t Burn – is based on the recurring [phrase in Mr Bulgakov’s work. Miss Faliks is at her finest as she deftly navigates the craggy, windswept heights and depths of the story. Here, Miss Faliks’ ability to suggest the mighty integrity of Mr Bulgakov’s prose architecture from multiple points of view within the musical narrative is particularly impressive in every way.

Also highly impressive is Miss Faliks’ reading of Liszt’s arrangements of the three Schubert pieces on the disc. Gretchen am Spinnade, Erlkonig and Am Meer. The former is daringly spacious, while Erlkonig is noble while the latter work is awash with delicate colours, graceful and eternally flowing.

Both her autobiography and this recoding come at a time when the threat of illegal occupation of Ukraine by Russia looms large. Of the four contemporary works on this disc, Mike Garson’s A Psalm for Odesa is heartbreakingly elegiac. Voices – with its entwined historical recordings seamlessly folded into it – is played with crystalline polyphonic clarity, its folk-like digressions all the more delightful for their naturalness.

The two other works [apart from suggesting that their composer, Clarice Assad, seems to be everywhere these days] take Miss Faliks’ pianism into sublimely cosmic regions in which the four movements of the Japanese-influenced Godai blossom and bloom because of the deftly woven textures that constantly engage the imagination. While the final work Hero is luminously performed.

There are two works – Notturno in G minor, H337 by Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn and Black Earth by the ingenious Fazil Say – are not on the disc. Miss Faliks has interiorised both with great skill and pays the first with uncommon lyricism, while in the latter the pianist captures its musical truths with great crepuscular beauty. Happily, both works are available as digital downloads.

The importance of Inna Faliks’ autobiography and this accompanying disc cannot be recommended too highly. Both will no doubt propel this extraordinary artist into the rarefied realm.

Inna Faliks: The Art of the Sublime

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