Inna Faliks: Stranger Things Album Review

You’ll rarely find a recording with a combination like this: Wagner, Brahms, Schoenberg, and two short works by the performer.

Inna Faliks (photo by Lisa Marie Mazzucco)

Ukrainian-born American pianist Inna Faliks (b. 1978) is a touring concert pianist and a Yamaha artist, and she holds the posts of Professor of Piano and Head of Piano at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

The core of the recording is Brahms’ Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, which the performer finds ‘both a masterful, architecturally elegant paean to Beethoven and the Sonata form, and an entirely unabashed Romantic outpouring in five movements’. She attacks it as a monumental work, producing both an authoritative performance and one that is finely nuanced in its attention to detail and construction.

Johannes Brahms: Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor – I. Allegro maestoso

The other works offer contrasts: Schoenberg’s Three Pieces, Op. 11 and Wagner’s Elegy.

Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke (“Three Piano Pieces”), Op. 11, were written in 1909, during his first experiments in atonality. At the same time, they mark the point at which he abandons traditional tonality but not its techniques, such as a lyrical melody and expressive appoggiaturas. Different analyses find different key centres when treating it as a tonal piece, and those analysing it as atonal find different organisational principles, such as motivic cells and hexachords.

Richard Wagner’s Elegy in A-flat major, written in 1858 and revised in 1881, is seen by Faliks as Wagner’s own ‘farewell to tonality’.

The two pieces by the pianist/composer herself trace back to music she composed at 10, as her family left Odesa, Ukraine, for a life in the West. Odesa to Slovakia to Austria to Vienna to Rome and finally Chicago, in the US. Faliks misses her days of composition, supplanted by days of piano practice and touring. Her opening work, Wandering Stranger, reflects her peripatetic youth, with the added vocal line voicing the ‘air of another planet’. When you want to be settled and all around you is in turmoil, perhaps another planet is just what one needs.

The idea for The Old Belltower comes from a painting she made as a child, looking at the many abandoned religious buildings scattered through the Soviet cities and countryside.

There’s a sense of wandering around the edges of this recording, anchored by the solid core of Brahms. We wander from home; we stare at dilapidated buildings, left on history’s shores; we experiment with leaving behind the centuries of tonality that maintained music for so long as we wander into new worlds and even new planets of sound. The strange planet that Faliks lays out for us is ours to explore.