Piano Variations

Pianist Inna Faliks was born in Soviet Ukraine, and the journey from there to the world’s major concert stages is the subject of her memoir – but what defines her playing is harder to summarize: The New Yorker called it “adventurous and passionate,” and she’s built a career that moves freely between the standard repertoire, living composers, and interdisciplinary projects that push the recital format into new territory.

She opens this program of piano variations with Beethoven’s Fifteen Variations with Fugue, Op. 35 – known as the Eroica Variations – music that marks an early breakthrough in his compositional voice. Upon completing it, he wrote to his publisher that it was “arranged in a truly quite new fashion.” Faliks performs at Kitt Recital Hall as part of the 2024 Flagstaff Piano Festival.

The second half of the broadcast features three performances from the 2025 Yamaha US-ASU International Piano Competition at Arizona State University, dedicated to discovering young pianists who bring their own interpretive voice to the concert stage. Listen for Nikolai Kapustin’s Op. 41 Variations – music at the intersection of classical form and jazz idiom, moving between a reworking of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and stride piano and Count Basie-style chords. Then, the finale from Dutilleux’s Piano Sonata: after World War II, Dutilleux decided most of what he’d written wasn’t worth keeping, and what survived became a work built around small melodic cells that grow and transform the way a memory keeps returning in a slightly different form. The program closes with Mozart’s Twelve Variations on an Allegretto – a theme whose origins nobody quite knows, put through variations that build slowly in rhythmic density before rounding off the way Mozart often does, by simply citing the theme again.