Inna Faliks

Inna Faliks’s 2023-24 concert season is marked by the long-awaited release of her memoir, Weight in the Fingertips – a Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage. , on bookshelves October 15th.  In March 2024, she will release the album Manuscripts Don’t Burn, a very personal album that is a combination of music written for her and music of Schubert-Liszt and Fanny Mendelssohn. Today’s program is a deeply personal celebration of both the book and the CD.

Faliks has asked the composers Maya Miro Johnson and Veronika Krausas to compose works for her that respond to one of her favorite novels, Ukrainian-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. A modern day retelling of Faust, it is also powerful commentary on the life of an artist during a totalitarian regime. Faliks carried the book out of Odessa when her family immigrated – and it has been a long-term companion through her artistic life, and is frequently mentioned in her own book.

Maya Miro Johnson imagines the character of Margarita. right before she meets Mephistopheles, in the book.  Manuscripts Don’t Burn is the most famous phrase from the novel – the devil speaks it as he recreates a lost manuscript of the Master, the lover of Margarita. This young composer uses extended techniques and many sound effects to create the mysterious dark landscape of the novel

Veronika Krausas creates an elegant dance suite that responds to a variety of quotes from the novel, chosen by Faliks. Minimalist and elegant, the music takes a more humorous, reserved approach to the novel.

Juxtaposing Black Earth and Sirota in this program allows Faliks to travel to the Black Sea. As her home city of Odessa is under attack, she conjurs it through the sounds of Sirota, which uses a 1907 recording of the “Jewish Caruso”, the legendary Odessa cantor Gershon Sirota. Black Earth is a reimagining of a tragic Turkish Ballad, complete with sounds of the Saz, a Turkish Lute.

Danielpour’s mournful Lullaby is from his piano suite “Joys and Sorrows”, written for Faliks to premiere in 2023. 

It is followed by Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantasie – the center piece of Faliks’s one woman show Polonaise-Fantasie the Story of a Pianist, on which her book is based.