Inna Faliks explores her Ukrainian Jewish heritage in new album: NPR

A new album by pianist Inna Faliks features world premiere recordings of works by five composers.

Rosalind Wong/Inna Faliks

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Rosalind Wong/Inna Faliks

A new album by pianist Inna Faliks features world premiere recordings of works by five composers.

Rosalind Wong/Inna Faliks

When Inna Faliks fled the Soviet Union with her family at the age of 10, she was carrying a precious cargo: Mikhail Bulgakov’s treasure. The Master and Marguerite.

This subversive fantasy revisits the story of Faust’s bargain with the devil through the prism of censorship. The text had such a profound impact on the pianist of Ukrainian origin that it serves as a touchstone for his latest album, Manuscripts do not burnwhich features world premiere recordings by five composers.

“There’s something very romantic about the idea that I was a dissident even then, carrying this book with me,” Faliks told NPR’s Michel Martin as he recounted his family’s trip to Vienna and Rome before landing in Chicago. “There are vampires and flying witches and generally annoying and helpful idiot administrators who are punished by these forces of nature. And I found it all completely fascinating and captivating.”

Strum and tap the strings

In some of the newly commissioned works, Faliks speaks lines from the novel or imitates certain characters, giving them new life to the listener’s ears.

Faliks sometimes strums the piano strings wildly “like I’m a cat with claws” in “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” by Maya Miro Johnson, a recent graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music. “And it actually evokes the sound of the fire, maybe a crackling in the fireplace. So it’s the manuscript that’s burning,” she said.

The pianist also whispers, hums and recites a passage of the text from Margarita’s changing point of view during the devil’s masquerade. There are echoes of ball music and bells from Giotto’s Campanile (bell tower) in Florence.

Veronika Krausas took an almost opposite approach for her elegant and understated “Master and Marguerite Suite for Speaking Pianist”. Before each movement, Faliks recites a short quote that she chose with the composer.

A new album by pianist Inna Faliks features world premiere recordings of works by five composers.

Hugh Kretschmer/Inna Faliks

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Hugh Kretschmer/Inna Faliks

A new album by pianist Inna Faliks features world premiere recordings of works by five composers.

Hugh Kretschmer/Inna Faliks

“Great art stands the test of time”

The album’s title comes from a scene where Satan, disguised as Professor Woland, grants Margarita a wish as thanks for serving as her ball queen. She demands the return of her lover, The Master, who wrote a novel (about Pontius Pilate) rejected by Soviet bureaucrats in 1930s Moscow under Stalin. Woland asks to see the novel when he finally meets the Master, who says he burned it. Woland then held up the book and said: “Manuscripts do not burn.”

“The message here is that great art stands the test of time. Honest art stands the test of time,” Faliks said.

The oft-quoted phrase from the novel also contains biographical elements. Bulgakov himself burned one of the first manuscripts of The Master and Marguerite. His criticism of Stalinist repression was not well received by Soviet censors. It was not until the late 1960s – more than two decades after Bulgakov’s death – that it was published in the Soviet Union, and only in censored form at first.

In turn, the new works trace a thread between the different elements of Faliks’ multifaceted biography. Here’s how she sums it up in her memoir published last year: “I knew I was a musician long before I knew I was Jewish, Ukrainian or Soviet.”

Musical trip to Ukraine

Composer Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin found “a way to bring Inna back to Ukraine, musically” in his Voice following. In one movement, an arpeggiated piano line accompanies a 1908 recording by Ukrainian cantor Gershon Sirota, who died during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising under Nazi occupation.

Mike Garson’s “Psalm in Odesa”, amplified here by the pianist’s own improvisations based on a traditional fisherman’s song, also marks a musical return to Ukraine. “I wanted to speak in Odessa and remember the city of my childhood. While the destruction and war in Ukraine continues, I continue to dream of returning to my hometown,” says Faliks.

She remembers first hearing that Odessa had been bombed when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. “I had lost my mother very recently,” she said. she declared. “I put on his Vyshyvanka – a Ukrainian shirt – and his red necklace. I recorded a video of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ sonata and sent it to Odessa, where I think it was broadcast on all kinds of Ukrainian websites just with a message of hope and love And it seemed completely unnecessary to me.

The album’s final five tracks are by Clarice Assad, who collaborated with poet Steven Schroeder to Godai, the five elements create musical sketches with spoken sounds and poems. They revolve around the five elements of Japanese Buddhism: wind, fire, water, earth and sky. An additional jazzy work, “Hero”, which was originally part of this suite, now stands alone.

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.