Pianist Inna Faliks and special guests are featured at the Music/Words 5th Season opening on September 23rd, at 7:30pm (doors at 6:30pm) at Le Poisson Rouge (tickets here), 158 Bleeker Street in New York City. This performance at LPR includes the world premiere of the powerful song cycle for baritone and piano by John Eaton, “Songs of Nature and Beyond”, with the wonderful baritone David Adam Moore. Faliks will play Beethoven’s Sonata in c minor, and also Fantasia on an Ostinato by John Corigliano. This poetic shimmering piece uses Beethoven’s Ostinato from the 7th Symphony, and explores its rhythmic and harmonic elements in a hypnotic, colorful fantasy. It serves as the link between Eaton and Beethoven sound worlds. Called “adventurous” and “passionate” by The New Yorker, Ukrainian-born, New York City based pianist Inna Faliks has established herself as one of the most passionately committed, exciting and poetic artists of her generation.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer lauds baritone David Adam Moore for his “enviable swagger coupled with a subtle musicality and big, handsome voice.” In the 2012-13 season, he sings Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire with Virginia Opera in addition to joining the Lyric Opera of Chicago for a performance of the same role. He returns to the roles of Prior Walter in Eötvös’ Angels in America in his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well as Mercutio in Roméo et Juliette with Arizona Opera.

 

The Barnard Women Poets Prize winning poet Sandra Beasley‘s poetry will be read by the author in between the pieces. The Eaton song cycle is set to the poetry by Auden, Blackmur, Wallace Stevens, and W.B Yeats, and Sandra’s lucid and fresh voice completes the link between then and now.

The following Music/Words performance is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, and takes place at Curtiss Hall, 410 South Michigan Ave. in Chicago, on October 22nd.  It includes readings by poets Vera Pavlova and Verzhyna Mort.