Pianist Jeremy Denk has lots to say. Actually, at this point, he’s probably as well known for his smart and funny blog “Think Denk” as he is for his performing activities, which encompasses everything from challenging solo recitals to accompanying a superstar like violinist Joshua Bell, a frequent concert partner.
While the best-known “Think Denk” essay is most likely the one which the pianist imagined former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin dissecting Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, this sample entry, in which Denk wraps himself around a particularly outrageous dynamic marking in a Gyorgy Ligeti score, is fairly typical:
In case you don’t know, three f’s is the loudest dynamic you would “normally” come across. Ligeti writes eight, which translates to a wonderfully silly Italian sussuration: Fortissississississississimo. My initial reaction to this is: the composer is a jerk. But I often have this reaction. Resenting the composer (usually dead, but not always!) is a fun practice tactic, something productive I’ve been able to pass on to my students…Ridiculously, staggeringly loud is one brute brand of infinity, but the best infinities in Ligeti are infinities of thought. He starts with a principle, a procedure. The procedure proceeds. But at some point, preferably just at the birth of complacency, Ligeti accelerates or compresses, he turns the mental dial to eleven. The code destabilizes itself.
That mix of wit and real musical and intellectual insight is just as intrinsic to Denk’s own playing as it is to his writing. While in our era younger performers are often pressured to specialize in particular composers or epochs, Denk brings searching intelligence and formidable pianistic skills to repertoire that stretches from the Baroque to the present. He takes great pleasure in making programmatic bedfellows of rather unlikely pairings—and in explaining just why such matches make sense.
After self-releasing a remarkable recording of Ives’ piano sonatas last year that landed all over various critics’ Top 10 of 2010 lists, Denk has just released a recording of Bach’s Partitas Nos. 3, 4 and 6 via the Azica label. This newest album coincides with a live performance pairing of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with Gyorgy Ligeti’s Etudes Book I and II, which he brings to Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall on Wednesday, February 16.
So why record these Bach partitas in particular? “They are just the ones I had played the most,” says Denk when I meet him over lunch in New York. “They’re the ones I’ve had the most feeling about. The two biggest ones, the D Major and the E minor, are the icons of the set. They’re in ridiculously different moods—the E minor is the most abstruse and tragic, and the D Major is the most sunny and genial and self-explanatory, in a certain way. So I’d been playing those a lot; they’re two of the pieces I love most in the world. And the A minor is the quirkiest, the weirdest.”
You seem to find a lot of weirdness in Bach, I point out to him. “I do, it’s true,” he says, laughing. “For me, there is a lot. I’m obviously drawn to things that are kind of quirky or ‘maverick-y,’ to quote Sarah Palin. I love when a composer is slightly tearing apart the framework in which she or he is writing. That’s what Ives does too. So often, Bach is co-opting something—he’s doing a shtick that has been done many, many times before, and he revels in contravening, in subverting the paradigm. He’s being naughty, more simply put. And I’d say that the A minor is the most naughty, and the most constantly humorous. But in Bach, there’s always those qualities side-by-side: the wit, along with a more seriousness of purpose.”
I remind Denk of something he once wrote about the Goldbergs in his blog, complete with its boldfaced sentiment:
“Bach must have felt the intervals were his friends, don’t you think? His best buds. He was closer to understanding them than anyone in history–their possibilities, their limitations, their quirks. Actually, let’s not kid ourselves: It is largely through his understanding of them that we now understand them.”
So, is there something similar at play in these Partitas, I wonder?
“I’d say that about keys, too, actually,” observes Denk. “Bach defined certain emotional worlds through different keys. I think those qualities are either intrinsic to the keys, or his emotional associations with different keys really stuck. Of course, the forms that he was writing in didn’t really last much after he wrote them,” Denak continues. “He wrote the summation of those old, Baroque, binary dance forms. People didn’t really write allemandes or such anymore after him. He sort of had the last word on them. We don’t really know what an allemande, for example, meant anymore to people in Bach’s time. We can judge to some extent from historical records, but you have the feeling—and not to draw on Ives again!—but perhaps the fourth Partita might have been as weird in Bach’s own time as Ives’ rethinking of ‘Yankee Doodle,’ which was totally off the reservation: to take the principle of an allemande, and to twist it, put it on steroids, do anything possible to it, wander off with it as bizarrely as he could and still make it all fit. The thing is, we have a distorted image now of such forms, I imagine; we conceive of those dances mainly in the way that Bach wrote them. He shaped our understanding of them.”
A program of Bach and Ligeti together, however, poses all kinds of challenges and questions of its own—not least of which is the superhuman pianism such a recital demands. (Somehow, in Denk’s hands, that becomes a non-issue.)
“There are several strands for me of connection between Bach and Ligeti,” Denk remarks. “One element is very simple: in 45 minutes, Ligeti is undermining all stability and tonality, in every possible way. And then Bach, is an hour of G Major that poses an impossible question and then gives an impossibly great answer. Bach also often set out to explore every possibility, every combination, every doable iteration of a certain idea. The famous anecdote, of course, is that as soon as he heard a little motive, a melody, some fragment, that he instantly knew every contrapuntal possibility. He loved to play with them, disperse all of them, play out all the mathematical possibilities across a canon. There’s always an element of philosophy in his compositions, and an element of exploring mathematical possibilities. Bach creates a whole cosmos in the Goldberg Variations, a kind of Newtonian mathematics, a cosmology of symmetry that is very circular. But there are three little black holes in there as well, G minors that give a feeling that this world is still even more complex than how it can be summed up in the Goldbergs.”
“But Ligeti is mathematics after chaos theory has explained that the universe is not exactly Newtonian, that there are small discrepancies,” Denk continues. “Ligeti follows certain wonderful mathematical ideas to their incredibly destabilizing, chaotic consequences, carrying some very simple ideas out to the nth degree. For me, that’s a very powerful connection between the two pieces. In Ligeti, very often the two hands are doing diabolically opposed things: either they’re in different key signatures, or they’re mathematically at odds. It’s the same in the Goldbergs, I find: there are all these variations in which the hands are criss-crossing each other or doing acrobatic leaps over each other, at war against or at play with each other.”
Ideas at play with each other: that’s the intellectual undercurrent that carries so much of Denk’s work so interesting, and so satisfying to his audiences.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
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