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.”
Ukrainian-born American pianist Inna Faliks has performed thousands of recitals and concerts in her career. The 45-year-old has also written a memoir, Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey From Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage, published last October by Backbeat Books. In her upcoming appearance at BroadStage in Santa Monica on May 19 — part of a mini-tour tied to the launch of her new album, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, which also lands at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on May 23 — Faliks will not only be demonstrating her musical prowess but also reading from her autobiography.
Born in 1978 in Odesa, then part of the Soviet Union, Faliks began piano lessons at age 5 with her mother Irene. Fleeing antisemitism, her family immigrated to Chicago when Faliks was 10; a mere five years later, she made her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
In addition to playing classics, Faliks is committed to contemporary music and has premiered works composed for her by, among others, Timo Andres, Billy Childs, Richard Danielpour, and Paola Prestini. In 2020, Ljova Zhurbin’s Voices was commissioned for Faliks by the Lowell Milken Fund for Jewish American Music, and for the pianist’s 2021 recording Reimagine: Beethoven and Ravel, nine contemporary composers responded to Beethoven’s Bagatelles, Op. 126, and Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit.
Now based in Los Angeles, the fiendishly busy Faliks is also founder and curator of Music/Words, an award-winning performance series in collaboration with distinguished poets. Currently professor and head of piano at UCLA, she is also a committed chamber musician. She’ll be in Northern California next month for a solo recital at The 222 in Healdsburg on June 8.
SF Classical Voice had a chance to speak with Faliks about her upcoming performances, her memoir, and her fervent attraction to new music.
How did your early life in Odesa impact you, and why did you decide to pen Weight in the Fingertips, which I understand was 12 years in the making?
My life in Odesa was a really beautiful upbringing, full of books, full of inspiration. I was what one would call a “child prodigy.” My father liked to make a joke that he was the only kid in Odesa who was not a musical prodigy. I was also a composer at [age] 9. Basically, the sounds, the smells, the sights of the city [and] my parents’ immense love for books [and] the arts made me who I think I am as an artist today.
My memories were so vivid, I began to write them down. I was pregnant with my son and had a concerto booked, and these vivid memories that were taking shape were more than just notes. When I moved to Los Angeles 11 years ago, it became a one-woman show, Polonaise-Fantaisie.
The book is based on that, but because of how long and engrossing and deep the process was, it became more than that story alone. Emigration from Odesa and assimilation [were] very complicated for a child in a new place, [but] it’s [ultimately] a book about love — of Hollywood proportions. It’s also a story of grief — I lost my mom to brain cancer a little over two years ago — and COVID. All of these things are in the book. It’s full of adventures and is really for everyone, not only for musicians or for people who know about music. It’s a fun, unputdownable read.
Inna Faliks
Your BroadStage program is quite varied. It includes Ljova Zhurbin’s Sirota (2011), Rodion Shchedrin Basso Ostinato (1961), and some Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin, along with a world premiere, Psalm for Odessaby Mike Garson, who’s perhaps best known for being David Bowie’s longtime pianist. How did you decide on these works?
Some are on my recording; some are mentioned in the book in a way that I think is interesting to audiences. [Beethoven’s] Eroica Variations is on the second half and is a small chapter in my book. It’s called “What’s So Great About Beethoven Anyway?” That piece is so delightful and joyful. It’s a wonderful way to end a concert that has moody music. The book has these longer narrative chapters, then shorter interludes. Beethoven is one of those.
Mike Garson knows so much about piano and piano music but comes from a different world. [His piece is based on a] famous song — not a Bowie tune — that everyone in Odesa knows, and I improvise a little bit. It’s a lovely, meditative hymnal that opens the concert. Following that is a piece by Zhurbin that uses a historical recording from [the] Jewish cantor Gershon Sirota. It’s a haunting piece.
You’re also playing a pair of works by Veronika Krausas, “Have You Stopped Loving Me?” and “14th on the Month of Nisan,” two parts of a suite composed for you in 2020.
Veronika is a good friend and wrote a very elegant suite for me on the book The Master and Margarita [by Mikhail Bulgakov], which is a big thing in my new recording. This book was almost like a recurring role in my life. I first read it as a child. It was banned and was an underground novel. I took it through immigration and felt naughty; I was a true dissident.
I read it many, many times, and it always inspired me in many different ways. I read the book to my mother when she was dying. It’s a great big love story — in my book and my life. My best friend from Odesa was living in Israel and picked it up and decided to find me. We [got married and] live in L.A. now and have two kids. Every good book should have a good love story.
That is fantastic — and with quite the Hollywood ending. The Wende Museum also commissioned Maya Miro Johnson to compose Manuscripts Don’t Burn for you as part of your Master and Margarita Project. Her piece makes use of voice, improvisation, and spoken word, correct?
Yes, it’s wild, with a lot of extended techniques. It’s very theatrical and is kind of crazy compared to Veronika’s piece.
Where does your love of contemporary music come from, what are your criteria in commissioning a work, and what is the process like?
It’s very interesting when music dialogues with something else. In Reimagine: Beethoven and Ravel, those were nine responses by nine different composers. The idea of creating a bridge between then and now and not having the composer bow down from the past but take it as a jumping-off point — these call-and-response type projects are interesting to me.
My criteria? [A work] has to be imaginative and rich and make me excited. My criteria are very, very wide, as long as the composer has imagination. I like music that in some way communicates powerful emotions. The style, the technique, it has to speak from the heart. I have collaborated with so many different composers, with completely different styles [and] compositional voices, but [I’m drawn to] the ones that are imaginative, honest, and speak with conviction and emotion.
[As for the process], these composers in my program are very good, and I trust them. It’s not like they show me many drafts. When I get the score, if something’s not clear to me — what the intention of the composer is, [for example] — then we have a conversation. It’s always so exciting and a pleasure. It’s also very neat to be able to have these dialogues because we can’t have them with Beethoven or Chopin.
Inna Faliks
Once a composer has written something and it’s being performed, they set it free. The best thing that can happen is it’s played differently every time. The fact there are so many different interpretations — that’s what makes it so alive. That’s why AI is not going to win.
I read that even as an 11-year-old, you scoffed at technical perfection as a goal rather than deeply considered music-making. How do you think that has shaped your playing?
I’ve always felt technical perfection in and of itself is not the point — even as a kid. For me, it was always about communication through music. I was always a very emotional performer — communicating the essence of the stuff. I don’t think that has changed. But your musical voice changes. You go through many ups and downs and experiences, but that essence was there for me — and hopefully will always be. In a way, my book deals with some of these challenges.
Since you teach at UCLA, I’m wondering what advice you might have for aspiring pianists?
I think everybody will have a life in music if that’s what they really, truly, passionately want. I have so many students who have a safety route, a double major. I never had that. It wasn’t a possibility for me. If you don’t see yourself doing anything except music, you have to be imaginative, trust your own voice, and be honest with your own voice. But I don’t know how they do double majors. I once thought about maybe getting a creative degree in writing, in literature. I wanted to write back then, and write I did.
What are your thoughts on the state of classical and/or contemporary music today?
People overall have a great sense of doom. There’s a negativity about it, but I don’t see it. I think things are complicated in many ways, but music is booming, and I love that. Borders are being erased between genres. I find it delightful to collaborate with jazz musicians. Billy Childs wrote a piece for me.
It’s the same with Clarice Assad’s Lilith Concerto, which I just performed at the National Gallery of Art [in March]. I think this concerto is going to be a classic. The fact that this is happening now seems so natural. I hope there will be more of that and more opportunities to perform.
Pianist Inna Faliks has issued recordings featuring material by Beethoven, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff, but no album’s she’s released, nor likely will release, is as personal as Manuscripts Don’t Burn. Consider: it includes five world premiere recordings written for her that focus on her favourite book, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita; honours her Ukrainian-Jewish heritage and pays tribute to her hometown of Odesa (also spelled Odessa); and augments in multiple works Faliks’ sterling piano playing with her own recitations. Faliks has no composer credits on Manuscripts Don’t Burn, yet the recording couldn’t be a more personal portrait.
While her command of standard piano repertoire is reflected in the inclusion of three Schubert-related pieces, Manuscripts Don’t Burn is distinguished for the most part by new material that speaks to her adventurous spirit. Further distinguishing her from other pianists, Faliks is a writer whose memoir, Weight in the Fingertips – A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage, was published in October 2023. She’s also known for her poetry-music series Music/Wordsand her monologue-recital Polonaise-Fantasie, the Story of a Pianist, which recounts her immigration to the United States from Odesa. All such experiences amplify the resonance of Manuscripts Don’t Burn; in fact, Faliks herself states that the seventy-three-minute recording is “something of a mirror image” to her memoir.
Considering how enduring a part Master and Margarita has played in her life, it’s fitting that the album (whose title comes from the work) would begin with Veronika Krausas’ Master and Margarita Suite for Speaking Pianist; the book’s Faust-related content, which involves an artist surviving in a totalitarian regime, clearly spoke to Faliks at an early age and continues to do so. Her arresting speaking voice precedes the piano part in each of the dance suite’s seven parts, with the poem identified first and the text read thereafter. At the outset, an ominous sarabande, intoxicatingly rendered by Faliks, announces the Master and Margarita’s imminent departure with the Devil; “14th of the Month of Nisan” colours the work with dramatic portent, after which a polonaise becomes a soundtrack to the nights streets of Moscow. A nimble-footed bagatelle evokes the dance of a devil spirit in the guise of a large black cat before the delicate epilogue resolves the work with peaceful stillness. The alternation between voice and piano proves powerful throughout when each intensifies the impact of the other.
The Faust story also informs Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, with the image here of the young Gretchen dreaming of Faust while at the spinning wheel and gradually losing control as her thoughts about love overtake her. The familiar strains of the song’s melodies entrance in Faliks’ beautifully executed performance, and like the two other Schubert pieces, Gretchen am Spinnrade is presented in a piano transcription by Liszt. Derived from a Goethe poem, Erlkonig (Erlking) involves the monstrous, supernatural Elf King and the eventual death of an abducted child; musically the oft-grandiose material suggests a horse’s gallop using repetitive patterns and the child’s pleading with urgent and desperate expressions. Set to a poem by Heinrich Heine, Am Meer (By the Sea) imagines two lovers by the seashore with the woman ultimately poisoning the man with her tears. Word-painting is deployed again when the musical temperament first evokes the calm of the sea and then the emotional turbulence endured by the pair.
Complementing the Krausas and Schubert pieces are ones by Maya Miro Johnson, Mike Garson, Ljova Zhurbin, and two by Clarice Assad (the digital version of the release includes two bonus tracks, Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn’s Notturno in G minor, H337 and Fazil Say’s Black Earth). Based on the Satan’s Ball scene in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Johnson’s theatrical Manuscripts Don’t Burn, for Speaking Pianist ranges widely and unpredictably from inner piano flourishes, sprinkles, and crushing chords to contemplative reverie and the recitation of a Russian text passage. Garson, most famously known as the pianist on Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, is represented by A Psalm for Odesa, a heartfelt expression that draws from an Odesan fisherman song, “Shalandi Polniye Kefali,” and incorporates improvisatory elements by Faliks.
As compelling as the album generally is, it’s Ljova Zhurbin’s Voices, Suite in Three Movements for piano and historical recordings that is perhaps the most striking for its incorporation of real-world documents of Jewish cantorial and klezmer music. “Sirota” augments Faliks’ hypnotic ostinati with the haunting sound of a 1908 recording of cantor Gershon Sirota chanting prayers for Rosh Hashannah in Warsaw. “Alter(ed) Zhok” pairs Faliks with a 1912 recording from Ukraine of an unidentified clarinetist, while “Freydele” finds the pianist playing alongside a stirring recording of the celebrated Yiddish singer Freydele Oysher from 1953.
Assad’s pieces have the unfortunate task of following Zhurbin’s, but they’re in no way of incidental value. Commissioned for Music/Words and featuring text by poet Steven Schroeder, Godai, the Five Elements, for Speaking Pianist features Faliks reciting, singing, and humming in its four short movements. “Dry Bones – Wind” conjoins blustery sound treatments, voice effects, and a poem recitation to an epic piano component; “Absence – Fire and Water” is animated by fiery rhythms and fluid runs; humming and atmospheric trills imbue “Earth” with a ghostly, Noh theater-like character; and “Ascension-Sky” concludes the work by cycling through swirling sixteenth-note patterns. Originally written as part of Godai, Assad’s even-faster Hero took on a separate life as a standalone piece available in different arrangements, with the torrential one on Faliks’ release the solo piano version, naturally.
Words and music illuminate each other throughout this singular expression by Faliks. It’s an extremely revealing portrait to the extent that in creating it she has shared details about her life, her beliefs and emotions, and her anguish over the vicious attacks being perpetrated upon her homeland. No one can ever totally know what someone else is going through, but with Manuscripts Don’t Burn Faliks has opened herself to others in such a way that they’re able to acquire a powerful sense of her own experiences.
Pianist Inna Faliks says about her new album: « It is my most personal album yet, with five premieres written for me in celebration of my favorite book, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, my Ukrainian-
Jewish heritage, my hometown of Odesa, and so much more. This collection of music speaks to my love of dialogue between music and words. The connections between text and sound here are not just literal but emotional, based on memory, intuition, dreams and hopes. »
Much of the music on the album revolves around Master and Margarita, a Russian novel about art censorship and dictatorship. Several of the pieces on the album are directly related to the book, including, of course, Veronika Krausas’ expressive pianistic suite Master and Margarita, which is still quite conventional, but also Maya Miro Johnson’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn (an important line in the book). This piece is more experimental than the others.
Clarice Assad’s Godai uses a text by Steve Schroeder for a five-part suite about the five elements (called Godai in Japanese Buddhism). The music is reminiscent of Ravel and Debussy. The pianist manages to make the pieces, in which she plays and speaks, very expressive.
One of the strongest compositions is Ljova Zhurbins Voices (3 movements for piano and historical recordings). The first piece is Sirota, and the historical recording features the phenomenal tenor voice of Ukrainian cantor Gershon Sirota from 1908.
The Alter(ed) Zhok refers to a folk dance and uses a recording made in 1912 in Skvira (UIkraine). Fraydele recalls the Yiddish actress and singer Fraydele Oysher. On the 1953 recording she sings the prayer Ov-Harachamim, which was written in the 12th century and commemorates the destruction of Ashkenazi communities around the Rhine by Christian crusaders during the First Crusade. Ljova Zhurbin has succeeded in composing a new piano accompaniment to Fraydele Oysher’s song, which supports it incredibly well.
Embedded in these works are transcriptions of Schubert songs by Franz Liszt, in which Inna Faliks shows herself to be a very personal and innovative pianist, both in terms of rhythm and phrasing.
Inna Faliks has also found her own approach to Fazil Say’s Black Earth, which makes the effective music a little more thoughtful and mysterious than in Say’s own recording.
Mike Garson’s Psalm to Odessa is based on a well-known Odessa song and contains improvisational elements that Faliks introduces very spontaneously. The bottom line is that this is an album for and of our time. On the other hand, it gives the pianist the opportunity to make her mark in terms of interpretation.
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.
The cover of Inna Faliks’ brilliant autobiography
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 SimonFaliks, 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.”
No longer taken for granted, Ms Faliks is a concert pianist of uncommon beauty
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 TheMaster 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 laG.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.
The intensity in the eyes is a mirrfor of the soul of the pianist
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?
Rehearsing feverishly, ready to dazzle a rapt audience
“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!”
The CD cover for Manuscripts Don’t Burn [Photo by Rosalind Wan Wong]
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.
At a recent performance at the National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY, Inna Faliks—classical pianist, educator, and author— introduced the program from her new CD, “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” (reviewed by Jon Sobel), at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, weaving her personal narrative through a diverse selection of old masters and new music she finely attuned performed at the piano, interspersed with texts she authored in her recently published memoir, Weight in the Fingertips.
With a dramatic feel for timing and declamatory finesse, Falik’s presence was simultaneously strong and emotionally vulnerable. At the piano, her flawless technique and expressiveness connected the dots and pauses between her commentary’s spoken words and the music, making the lessons gleaned from her life experiences as stimulating as instructive. She alternated vivid personal anecdotes from her memoir with more emotional ones, describing her childhood in Soviet Odessa (today in Ukraine), the family’s immigration in the late eighties, the loss of her mother, a found-again love story with her husband (in the audience), and her musical journey, marked by her performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra only five years after she immigrated to the US at the age of ten.
With her deep and warmly resonating voice, Faliks rendered an intimate program based on the playbook of her life with remarkable emotional honesty. That evening, we learned about her juggling home and career as a concertizing artist, a piano professor, and UCLA’s head of piano faculty. Although we did not hear about her thoughts about some of the more profound perplexities in her life, such as the sudden interest in her birth in Ukraine, she describes so aptly in her book:
“In my piano competition years, my name would often appear in the program next to a tiny yellow-and-blue flag, listing me as “Ukrainian American pianist Inna Faliks.” I rarely encountered the flag otherwise. Now, the blue and yellow are everywhere, including a “Ukraine” flavor at a Los Angeles ice cream shop that was just vanilla with food coloring. Being from Ukraine is not a commodity; it is not hip or fun, and it is not an identity to be performed. This is about families destroyed, people dying, and a power of pure evil seeping into a larger world.” Faliks comments on the Ukraine-Russia war.
In addition to her comments on the Ukraine-Russia war in her writing, she also addresses her Jewish identity. With religion banned under communism, and though she “knew she was a musician long before she knew she was Jewish, Ukrainian, or Soviet,” the stamp on her passport marking her as “Jewish” did not refer to her religious practice; it defined a strong ethnic and cultural Jewish identity amongst the Jewish population.
But throughout the Soviet Union’s rampant history of systemic Antisemitism, that stamp also provided a free pass to discriminate against an unprotected minority until the combined impact of a crumbling system and pressure from Western Jews allowed for the tremendous East-Western exodus.
In her recent article in the Jewish Journal, UCLA Response to Antisemitism Hits a Sour Note, Faliks also draws on all of her own experiences of living with Soviet Antisemitism—which she thought she and her family had finally left far behind when arriving in the West, in America, the land of the free— and how these hopes have quickly been dashed given room to the lethal power of the new wave of Anti-Jewish hate as experienced on the college campus at UCLA, where Faliks works as an educator, as part of its piano faculty.
“Antisemitism has impacted my life so much and on so many levels,” says Faliks, fighting back tears in her voice while searching for the right words to describe her disappointment about the failure of the university’s inability to put a halt to the indiscriminate, vicious, and virulent hate that has spun out of control on the American campus.
“I can’t believe the sheer impact and size of the propaganda machine built by the Iranian-led support for Hamas, the erasure of truth and history after its October 7th massacre, and the blatant idolization of its terrorist perpetrators by students and faculty from my school.”
If protecting a minority’s rights once meant equally standing for all minorities’ rights, this seems to have shifted into a different—more radical idea that demands exclusive support for some minorities to the exclusion of all others—like in George Orwell’s famous novella Animal Farm, where some pigs are “more equal” than others, completely undermining existing moral truths. This response clearly … works against true equality.
“I have experienced horrific degradation, and I say that not just as a person of Jewish descent, but as a human being, as an artist, as an educator. My humanity has been tampered with,” she says.
True to her personal style, Faliks appeals to the individual experience we can all connect with when she opens her article by describing her pre-concert encounter with the piano tuner before her concert, who remarked on Faliks wearing her Magen David necklace. The piano tuner commended her for her bravery since wearing the little necklace with the Star of David, which openly defines her as a Jewish person, has become potentially dangerous on American campuses and streets.
Pianist Inna Faliks’ new release is a companion to her new memoir, Weight in the Fingertips (Backbeat Books, 2023). Here, the Odessa-born pianist has taken her love for her homeland, Ukraine, in the midst of war and explores concepts of censorship and dictatorship in a variety of new pieces presented here in Manuscripts Don’t Burn. The title itself comes from a 1967 Mikhal Bulgakov novel, The Master and the Margarita. This retelling of Goethe’s Faust also becomes a unifying feature for some of the other works on the album. The release features these new pieces that blend dialogue and music inviting reflection of the music’s intent and suggestiveness.
The opening Master and Margarita Suite (2022) by Veronika Krausas, is provides brief introductory excerpts from Bulgakov’s novel and explores different characters and moments from the work. Each brief movement takes a more free exploration of earlier musical forms (sarabande, polonaise—with a quote from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, waltz, bagatelle). The tonal focus of the music lends a semi-extended romantic quality to the music with interesting splashes of virtuosic gestures across the rather intriguing work. The title work, Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2022) by Maya Miro Johnson focuses on the Satan’s Ball scene of Bulgakov’s novel focusing on Margarita’s vision of the world. It utilizes some more avantgarde styles of clusters and strumming in the piano strings among more angular lines as it explores the full range of the instrument.
Three Schubert songs, two inspired by Goethe and one by Heine, are also part of the first half of this recital. They are all Liszt’s transcriptions and provide a nice palette cleanser stylistically to the contemporary works on the program. Both Gretchen am Spinnrade and Erlkonig serve as interludes to the works that follow. The former to Johnson’s piece with its reference to the young Gretchen/Margarita dreaming of Faust at her spinning wheel. The latter serves as a sort of postlude to the first half of the release. Am Meer becomes the transition into the second part of the program with its seascape inspirations. Psalm to Odessa (2023) by Mike Garson incorporates an Odessan fisherman’s song as it reflects also on the destruction in Ukraine and pulls us into the new directions of the narrative here.
Voices (2011, 2019-20) is an interesting suite in three movements that incorporates historical recordings into the performance. The piece, by Ljova Zhurbin, uses a 1908 recording of Jewish cantor as the work begins. At the center is a setting of an Ukrainian folk dance incorporating a 1912 field recording. The final movement features a 1953 recording from Yiddish actress/singer Fraydele Oysher. It thus provides interesting snapshots of the rich musical heritage of the region.
Music by Clarice Assad brings the album to a conclusion. First is Godai, The Five Elements (2013) which also features poetry by Steven Schroeder. The music here shifts to Japanese Buddhism and the five elements of the world: wind, fire, water, earth, and sky. Assad utilizes a lot of interesting effects to imply the ethnic musical inspirations here while also providing a variety of musical challenges for the performer that further highlight Faliks’ skills. The album closes with Heroes (2013) which was originally conceived as part of the earlier suite but has been featured in other settings. Here it serves as an upbeat, hopeful conclusion to the storytelling across the release.
The overall conception of the release works superbly with musical settings that invite reflection along the musical and textual journey that Faliks takes. Her own virtuosic abilities also shine here and are perhaps more apparent in the excellent performances of the three Liszt-transcriptions. The same dedication and musical interpretations there all can be discerned in the newer pieces written for her that complete the release. As we move from the storytelling first half into the more personal aspects of history and its connection to modern events, we get a new sense of the dramatic abilities of Faliks. There are moments that are quite touching here as musical quotations are overcome by intense, contemporary writing styles. The musical choices tend to point out this interesting struggle between the troubled regional history and its many folk and cultural connections.
The sound captures the piano’s rich quality and provides a solid presence to the instrument. For those accessing the album through streaming services, there are two additional pieces (one by Fanny Mendelssohn, and one by Fazil Say) to enjoy as well which add another twelve minutes of music to this engaging new release.
“Inna Faliks’s words have the same fluidity and assurance as her piano playing; both are well worth your attention. There are a lot of musician’s memoirs out there; this one, about a piano prodigy turned professional, is a standout. Highly recommended.”
— Anne Midgette
“In her autobiography Weight in the Fingertips, Inna Faliks gives a very personal account of her life, full of vivid, colorful details and written in a very beautiful, rich language. An interesting, informative, and enjoyable reading.”
— Evgeny Kissin, concert pianist and composer
“The story of Inna Faliks’s life is not your everyday book of a great musician’s beginnings. Like life, it is filled with the unexpected, moving from horror to hilarity, despair to hope. I just kept laughing and crying. It is unforgettable and paints a profound portrait of life; what is lost and what is found.”
— Stephen Tobolowsky, actor and author of The Dangerous Animals Club
“A moving, exciting artistic journey by an important female voice, told with honesty and immediacy. I couldn’t put it down— life’s twists can certainly be more surprising than fiction.”
— Jane Seymour, Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actress
Before she knew she was Ukranian, Soviet, or Jewish, Inna Faliks knew she was a musician. Growing up in the city of Odessa, the piano became her best friend, and she explored the brilliant, intricate puzzles of Bach’s music and learned to compose under her mother’s watchful eye. At ten, Faliks and her parents moved to Chicago as part of the tide of Jewish refugees who fled the USSR for the West in the 1980s. During the months-long immigration process, she would silently practice on kitchen tables while imagining a full set of piano keys beneath her fingertips. In Weight in the Fingertips, Faliks gives a globe-trotting account of her upbringing as a child prodigy in a Soviet state, the perils of immigration, the struggle of assimilating as an American, years of training with teachers, and her slow and steady rise in the world of classical music. With a warm and playful style, she helps non-musicians understand the experience of becoming a world-renowned concert pianist. The places she grew up, the books she read, the poems she memorized as a child all connect to her sound at the piano, and the way she hears and shapes a musical phrase illuminate classical music and elite performance. She also explores how a person’s humanity makes their art honest and their voice unique, and how the life-long challenge of retaining that voice is fueled by a balance between being a great musician and being a human being. Throughout, Faliks provides powerful insights into the role of music in a world of conflict, change, and hope for a better tomorrow.
Concert pianist Inna Faliks is only in her 40s, but has already lived a memoir-worthy life. The title of her book Weight in the Fingertips refers to one of her foundational approaches to playing the piano. But the book is no musician’s manual, nor will it interest only fellow students of the musical arts.
In her memoir Faliks intertwines musical observations and reminiscences with a lively account of growing up in then-Soviet Odessa (in today’s Ukraine); emigrating to Chicago; an unfortunate first marriage and a successful second one; and traveling the world, as her career as a concert artist and educator blossomed.
Beyond Barbie
A child of the USSR, Faliks grew up on a diet of atheism, state propaganda, modest circumstances, and envy for Western culture and riches. As young Inna prepared to emigrate, another girl who is also leaving for the U.S. showed her an unusual doll. “And I assume you already have a Barbie?…Well, I think you may as well forget living in the United States without a Barbie.”
There was also ever-present if nonviolent antisemitism. Though the Soviet Union had essentially outlawed religion, being Jewish was an undesirable ethnicity. Still, Faliks vividly evokes a childhood that was, for the place and time, fairly normal – except for her unusual musical talent, which led to local notoriety as a piano and composition prodigy. Her first encounter with Jewish culture came during emigration, at the Rome home of a musician, where she found Hebrew books, a mezuzah, and Shabbat dinner.
Stranger in a Strange Land
The account of her family’s passage to the U.S. by way of a two-month stay in Rome is striking for both its quotidian yet tense drama and for the way young Inna seemed to coolly adapt and make the most of the culture-hopping. She was an unusually perceptive and thoughtful youngster. “Even as an eleven-year-old,” she writes, recounting lessons with her first influential U.S. piano teacher, she chafed at the idea of “technical perfection [as] a goal in and of itself rather than a by-product of focused, deeply considered and felt music making.”
Years later she’s still struggling with this “agonizing” dichotomy. “It takes years to reconcile the intellect with intuition and emotion so they work together seamlessly.” Throughout the book, she offers remarkably resonant and redolent descriptions of an artist’s interior workings. Her commentaries on iconic pieces and composers are original and thought-provoking. “What’s so great about Beethoven?” she asks herself after playing at an elementary school, and answers herself: “He makes children laugh.” In a studio to record Clara Schumann’s G Minor Piano Sonata, she plays the adagio second movement “again and again…faster, slower, with varied voicings, a deeper legato, more transparent textures…Picking a version [for the album] will take many hours.”
A Life at the Piano
Faliks paints powerful pictures of her successive mentors, the teachers and advisors who nurtured her talent and influenced her thinking and her technique. She sketches with verve her parents, her friendships, and her love affairs with places as well as with other humans. Along the way we meet a variety of outsized characters, from legendary pianist and teacher Leon Fleisher to regal, painfully status-conscious patron Amalia di Medici. She recalls the latter explaining purposely misprinting the pianist’s name on a concert poster: “Well, darrrrling, your name just had to go. This is an elegant society. It was just too phallic.”
The book will also appeal to travelers and fans of travel writing. Of life on the concert circuit she writes, “I would descend on a town for a few days, get drunk on its quirks and characters, and walk the streets of a new miniature world that I discovered and would keep in the pocket of my memory until new experiences diluted it.” That rings so true.
So does the book as a whole. It’s a fine achievement when an artist with skills so advanced they may seem incomprehensible to the average person can write a memoir that can resonate so well with that same person.
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.
