The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts presents an evening with acclaimed pianist Inna Faliks, who breaks new ground with a breathtakingly innovative homage to Beethoven and Ravel that includes the live premieres of imaginative and rich new works for the piano by nine contemporary composers, including Paola Prestini, Billy Childs, Timo Andres, Richard Danielpour, Peter Golub, Ian Krouse, David Lefkowitz, Mark Carlson, and Tamir Hendelman, on Thursday, January 13, 2021, 7:30 pm, in The Wallis’ Bram Goldsmith Theater. On the program are Beethoven’s Bagatelles, op. 126, and Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit alongside the new works by the nine composers, the latter six all UCLA faculty composers, who were commissioned to craft responses to these masterpieces. A pre-concert Prelude with Inna Faliks takes place on stage at 6:30 pm.
The performance also celebrates Faliks’ CD release of the program on Navona Records, which was recorded/produced during the global pandemic with the help of Yamaha’s Disklavier technology. According to critics, the results are exhilarating, not least owing to Faliks’s stunningly precise and sensitive pianistic interpretation. Inna Faliks is a Yamaha Artist. Commissions supported by Davise Fund, UCLA, and Yamaha Artist Services.
Ticket prices are $29-$79 per person. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. To purchase tickets and for more information, please call 310-746-4000 (Monday – Friday, 10 am to 6 pm) or visit TheWallis.org/faliks.
“Adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker) Ukrainian-born American pianist INNA FALIKS has made a name for herself through her commanding performances of standard piano repertoire, as well genre-bending interdisciplinary projects, and inquisitive work with contemporary composers. After her acclaimed teenage debuts at the Gilmore Festival and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she has appeared on many of the world’s great stages in recital and with many major orchestras, performing with conductors Leonard Slatkin, Keith Lockhart and many others. Her recent seasons include performances at Ravinia Festival in Chicago, National Gallery in Washington DC, Chigiana Academy in Italy, as soloist with US orchestras nation-wide, and repeated tours of all the major venues in China. Faliks collaborates with and premieres music by some of today’s most significant composers, including Billy Childs, Richard Danielpour, Timo Andres and Clarice Assad. She founded the award-winning poetry-music series Music/Words in 2008, with dozens of performances in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, both on stage and on WFMT radio. She regularly tours her monologue-recital Polonaise-Fantasie, the Story of a Pianist, which tells the story of her immigration to the United States from Odessa with music by Bach, Chopin, Gershwin and Carter (recorded on Delos). Inna Faliks’ discography includes Reimagine: Beethoven & Ravel (Navona, 2021), for which she commissioned nine composers to respond to Beethoven’s Bagatelles op 126 and Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit. Also released in 2021 (MSR Classics) is The Schumann Project, Volume 1, which includes Clara Schumann’s G minor sonata and Robert Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes opus 13. Other releases include all-Beethoven and Rachmaninoff/Ravel/Pasternak discs for MSR Classics, and The Master and Margarita project, featuring three world premieres on Sono Luminus (2022). Faliks is professor and head of Piano Studies at UCLA, and in demand world-wide as a masterclass artist and adjudicator. She is also a published writer, with articles and essays appearing in Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, among other media outlets. Inna Faliks is a Yamaha Artist.