Sound of Verse - Piano Music of Pasternak, Ravel & Rachmaninov

Album review

Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks has chosen an interesting program for her debut recording on MSR Classics, Sound of Verse. The idea is to relate poetry to music, and unusually poetic texts are included in the booklet as a counterpoint to the purely instrumental piano music on the disc; normally one does not get verse in the book unless something is being sung. Boris Pasternak is a natural choice to lead off the disc; although many are familiar with his Nobel Prize-winning novel Doctor Zhivago, and in Russia he is regarded as one of her greatest poets, not many are aware that in his formative years Pasternak was an adherent of the "Scriabin school" and that his first ambition was to become a composer. The Sonata in B minor of Pasternak and the two preludes included here were written before Pasternak achieved his twentieth year; the B minor Sonata is a startling work for 1909, quite advanced in its harmonic ideas, though essentially romantic in spirit, reflecting the influence of Scriabin -- who was Pasternak's neighbor when he was a boy growing up -- but also venturing into polyphonic territory that faintly resembles the contemporary efforts of Ferruccio Busoni. It's a pity Pasternak did not continue in music, owing to a lack of confidence in his skills as a pianist, but those familiar with his writing will view it as worthy trade-off.
The Ravel Gaspard de la Nuit is a familiar standard to the extent that not everyone relates it to the source of its inspiration, the prose-poems collected under that rubric by pioneering symbolist poet Aloysius Bertrand. The connection is drawn a bit clearer through the inclusion of Bertrand's texts in the book, and Faliks' performance is both strong and clearly articulated, although a bit drier than the norm, concentrating on transmission of the musical text more than establishing an atmosphere. The pièce de resistance here, however, is Faliks' reading of the Rachmaninoff Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat, Op. 36, a work Rachmaninoff composed in 1913 but dropped from his repertoire when he departed from Russia in 1917. When Rachmaninoff decided to revive the work in 1931 he decided to eliminate 120 measures from the score, adding up to about six minutes of music. Faliks plays the seldom-heard original version, which is far weightier and virtuosic than the more familiar revision. For this, Faliks pulls out all of the bravura and sensitivity she can muster, resulting in a highly satisfying conclusion to the overall program. Faliks is most decidedly a promising talent with a lot ahead of her; if she can keep up the momentum and level of artistry shown in MSR Classics' Sound of Verse, then there should be no stopping her.

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