The music on this disc is too unconventional to describe neatly. There are as many ways to play it as there are people who choose to play it. This is why the question, does the world need another Beethoven CD? did not cause me too much grief while I was making this recording (though it did, of course, rear its taunting head). At any given moment, Beethoven is at once surprising and inevitable, direct and intricate, earthy and transcendent. Ever fresh, the music changes with each utterance. Recording it is a step in a wondrous journey. The four works on this disc present Beethoven's boundless imagination in a number of guises. Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks is a passionately committed, exciting and poetic artist. After highly acclaimed debuts at the Gilmore Festival and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she has performed on the world's great stages with orchestras, and in recital and chamber music settings. Faliks has performed throughout the United States, as well as in France, Italy, Switzerland, Ukraine, Estonia, Japan and Russia, and has performed in major venues, including Weill Recital Hall, Le Poisson Rouge and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Salle Cortot in Paris, Orchestra Hall in Chicago and Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow. She has been featured on international radio and TV, and regularly appears at festivals, including as Verbier, Newport, Brevard, Taos, Bargemusic, Peninsula and Chautauqua. She has performed numerous concertos under notable conductors, including Leonard Slatkin and Keith Lockhart, and has partnered in chamber music with Colin Carr, Wendy Warner, Nathaniel Rosen, Fred Sherry, among others. Committed to innovative programming of rare and new music as well as audience communication and education, she is the winner of many prestigious competitions, including the Hilton Head International Competition and the International Pro Musicis Award. Known for her wide-ranging repertoire and intense musical commitment, Faliks is the founder and curator of Music/Words, an ongoing interdisciplinary poetry- music series based in New York, broadcast annually on WFMT in Chicago. In this series, she has partnered with such renowned poets as Vera Pavlova, Mark Levine and Jesse Ball. Her other interdisciplinary projects included a Chicago performance with Downton Abbey s Lesley Nicol (Mrs. Patmore) in a sold-out play for actor and pianist depicting the life of Dame Myra Hess. As recording artist, she has released the highly acclaimed CD Sound of Verse [MSR MS1333] and a recital recording for the Yamaha Disklavier library. Inna Faliks, who studied with Ann Schein, Boris Leon Fleisher, Gilbert Kalish and Boris Petrushansky, is currently Associate Professor of Piano at UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
