On her latest solo album, pianist and composer Inna Faliks reflects on the musical forces that have shaped her artistic voice. The program begins with two hand-written manuscripts in a backpack, two short pieces composed by a 10-year-old composer-pianist crossing the border from Ukraine to Slovakia, en route to Austria. “I was immigrating from Odesa, Ukraine, a Jewish refugee on a bus full of people like me, with my parents and two giant suitcases,” says Faliks. “We were leaving everything we knew for an unknown place….After months on the road, in Vienna and Rome, we arrived and settled in Chicago.” Faliks’s works appear alongside works by Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Wagner, and Johannes Brahms, tracing a path from Romantic tradition to the expressive freedoms of early modernism.