Back in my student days, I encountered any number of creative artists who subscribed to the adage, “If I want to deliver a message, I’ll call Western Union!” These days I doubt if anyone knows about (let alone remembers) Western Union, thanks to the Internet. However, if messages are now “delivered” through electronic mail, the principle still remains that trying to “deliver a message” through artistic creativity turns out, more often than not, to be a fool’s errand.
Inna Faliks on the cover of her latest album (courtesy of Classical Music Communications)
That principle serves as context for my latest encounter with an album of Odessa-born pianist Inna Faliks. Some readers may recall my account of her Delos CD entitled Polonaise-fantaisie: The Story of a Pianist. That account made it clear that her talking rubbed me the wrong way; and, on her latest album, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, she is still at it. The good news is that this time she is delivering the words of others. Nevertheless, her deliveries tend to be vapid; and the very idea of alternating spoken text with short movements for solo piano has little impact other than cringe-inducing.
The good news is that there are a few tracks that provide more justice to the music than to the pianist’s verbal ventures. There are three tracks of Franz Liszt solo piano arrangements of songs by Franz Schubert, which are given straightforward enough accounts to make for satisfying listening. Similarly, the album concludes with “Hero,” composed for solo piano by Clarice Assad in 2013 and appearing on a recording for the very first time. Unfortunately, this appears as a “postlude” to the far less impressive speaking-pianist venture Godai, the Five Elements, which Assad composed for Faliks.
On the whole this album is a self-preening undertaking, which talks too much and delivers too little.
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