Inna Faliks' recent biography is a captivating and deeply personal account of a child prodigy-performer-teaching artist. She writes with a directness and an inviting intimacy that I would categorize as "un-put-down-able."

"Faliks cleverly adopts the musical device of the interlude several times throughout Weight in the Fingertips, momentarily pausing or shifting her narrative with beautifully descriptive essays that focus on specific musical pieces or artists that have touched her deeply."

Faliks paints powerful pictures of her successive mentors, the teachers and advisors who nurtured her talent and influenced her thinking and her technique. She sketches with verve her parents, her friendships, and her love affairs with places as well as with other humans.

The importance of Inna Faliks’ autobiography and this accompanying disc cannot be recommended too highly.

Of course this is the story of piano virtuoso Inna Faliks from her beginnings as a ‘wunderkind’ in poverty-stricken Odessa, Ukraine, played out over her musical and romantic adventures throughout Europe, the United States, China, and even Russia. But it is much more than that. It is Inna’s Eroica: a mirror to Beethoven’s towering heroic variations for piano with all its shifts, emotions, and surprises that play a recurring role throughout this endearingly engaging book. As Inna navigates her way through a moving and well-crafted coming-of-age story about a young person determined to unleash everything within her, she is a storytelling Beethoven, communicating via the language that binds us all: music.

Inna Faliks’s memoir is a rare and colorful window into the fraught process through which a young, vulnerable talent becomes a virtuoso. Filled with insights and adventures, her recollections—from tentative beginnings in Odessa to eye-opening explorations at cultural centers around the world—reveal the challenges of coming of age in the pressurized atmosphere of an emerging artist. Along the way she allows us to peer into the secrets behind the forging of beautiful sounds. Weight in the Fingertips explores the thrills, dangers, frustrations and triumphs of a life in music.

Inna Faliks's playing long ago convinced me she had universes inside her. Now, in this memoir, we are shown the thousand rooms of a house spread across years and continents, in a style swift, considered & conspiratorial. One wants to remember one's own life this way.

In her autobiography Weight in the Fingertips, Inna Faliks gives a very personal account of her life, full of vivid, colorful details and written in a very beautiful, rich language. An interesting, informative, and enjoyable reading.

The story of Inna Faliks's life is not your everyday book of a great musician’s beginnings. Like life, it is filled with the unexpected, moving from horror to hilarity, despair to hope. I just kept laughing and crying. It is unforgettable and paints a profound portrait of life; what is lost and what is found.

A moving, exciting artistic journey by an important female voice, told with honesty and immediacy. I couldn't put it down— life's twists can certainly be more surprising than fiction.

This is a gorgeously written memoir from an absolutely original voice that braids the book's concerns—music, pride in a difficult identity, immigration, belonging—into a spellbinding vision of the transcendent saving power of art.

Inna Faliks's words have the same fluidity and assurance as her piano playing; both are well worth your attention. There are a lot of musician's memoirs out there; this one, about a piano prodigy turned professional, is a standout. Highly recommended.

Inna Faliks travels the world and becomes a musician of poetry and power. What an inspiring book—and life.

A gripping tour-de-force packed with adventure, challenge, survival, heartbreak, love, and above all, the power of music. Inna Faliks is a storyteller to the manner born, who is not afraid of honesty and emotion, yet avoids any trace of self-indulgence. Her generous spirit, her sense of humor and gift for narrative pacing make it difficult to put this book down for a second. In short, here is a great musician and pianist who proves time and again to be equally articulate and communicative away from the keyboard.

Inna Faliks is an internationally acclaimed classical concert pianist and is Head of Piano and Professor of Piano at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. After her acclaimed debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age fifteen, she has performed on many of the world’s great stages with numerous orchestras and in solo appearances. Her discography includes “Sound of Verse: Music of Boris Pasternak, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff” and “Polonaise-Fantasie, Story of a Pianist” (which includes spoken passages that inspired this book). Falik’s distinguished career has taken her to numerous recitals and concerti in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, Ravinia Festival, and the Shanghai Oriental Theater. She is frequently invited to guest artist residencies at leading conservatories, universities, and festivals.