Music/Words Presents Concert Featuring Clarice Assad & Inna Faliks With Samantha Malk, 4/22

Music/Words (www.musicwordsnyc.com), an interdisciplinary series founded and curated by NYC- based pianist Inna Faliks (www.innafaliks.com), continues its fourth season on Sunday, April 22, 2012, at 6:00 pm with a performance at New York's Cornelia Street Cafe featuring Faliks and guest pianist Clarice Assad at the piano along with soprano Samantha Malk and poet Irina Mashinski. The program will explore the sensuousness of early Schoenberg (with the Stefan Georgy poetry used in the songs), along with the passion of Mashinski's poetry and Assad's Brazilian music. The program includes Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstucke, opus 11; his songs from Book of Hanging Gardens; and various improvisations by Ms. Assad based on Brazilian piano music. The Cornelia Street Café (www.corneliastreetcafe.com) is located at 29 Cornelia Street, Greenwich Village, NYC. Tickets are $20 (includes a drink or credit against food) and are available by calling 212-989-9319.

The series MUSIC/WORDS celebrates links between poetry and music by presenting collaborations between solo performers and acclaimed contemporary poets in the form of a live recital/reading.

Inna Faliks created the series in order to foster a chance for poets and musicians to work together and inspire each other, as well as to allow different audiences to come together for these musical-literary events. New published and unpublished works are read alongside performances of music old and new and connected by content, intuition, and inspiration.

According to Faliks, "I pair performers together based on their personalities and styles, and encourage them to choose the poems and music in varied ways that are strongly and intuitively connected."

In this performance, Ms. Mashinski will tailor her readings to Ms. Assad's, Ms. Malks' and Ms. Faliks' musical selections, finding poems from her own works that connect with the music. Music/Words will be featured in regular live broadcasts throughout the month of April on WFMT Radio in Chicago.

Clarice Assad (www.clariceassad.com) is a pianist, arranger, a vocalist and a composer. Her works have been published in France (Editions Lemoine), Germany (Trekel), and in the United States (Virtual Artists Collective Publishing), and have been performed in Europe, South America, the United States and Japan. Miss Assad's music often have a thematic core, and explore the physical and psychological elements of the chosen story or concept. With a repertoire in continuous expansion, her works are sought out by musicians both in the classical and the jazz realms.

South African soprano Samantha Malk recently returned from a concert tour around China, Vietnam and Thailand. At the end of 2010, she made her Weill Hall debut recital at Carnegie Hall. During that summer, she finished her engagement as a young artist for the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Music Festival in Chicago. In July 2010, the International Contemporary Ensemble invited Samantha as the guest soprano in a live broadcast on WQXR Classical Radio New York as well as a two-day music festival celebrating the music of Edgar Varèse at Alice Tully Hall. Earlier that year, during an alumni residency, Samantha performed songs of Debussy and Schumann lieder at the Britten Pears Music Festival. Her operatic roles include Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Nannetta in Falstaff, Belinda in Dido and Aeneas and Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro. After immigrating to the United States, Samantha came to study music, earning her Bachelor of Music at Indiana University and her Master of Music at Manhattan School of Music.

Bilingual poet and translator Irina Mashinski has authored seven books of poetry in Russian, and her most recent collections are Volk (Wolf) and Raznochinets pervyi sneg i drugie stikhotvoreniia (Raznochinets First Snow and Other Poems). Her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry International, Fulcrum, Zeek, The London Magazine, and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky, as well as co-founder and co-editor of the Cardinal Points literary journal, published in the U.S. in English and Russian. She also serves on the editorial board for the NYC based translation project "Ars-Interpes." Irina Mashinski is the winner of several literary awards, including the First Prizes at the Russian America (2001), Maximilian Voloshin (2003), and other poetry contests. Her poetry has been translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Serbian.

Ukrainian-born, New York City based pianist Inna Faliks has established herself a poetic artist. After her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she has performed on many of the world's great stages, with numerous orchestras, in solo appearances, and with conductors such as Leonard Slatkin and Keith Lockhart.  Her CD on MSR Classics, "Sound of Verse", was released in 2009.