SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015 AT 3 PM
Jeremy Denk, piano, and Stefan Jackiw, violin
“It took all of one phrase to realize we were in for a performance of uncommon musical substance…. it’s clear he has thought more deeply than many of his peers about an essential koan of interpretation: how to wed genuine devotion to a composer’s vision with playing of interior participation and personal freedom.” – Boston Globe
FEATURING
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE
Jeremy Denk is one of America’s most thought-provoking, multifaceted, and compelling artists. The pianist is the winner of a 2013 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the 2014 Avery Fisher Prize, and Musical America’s 2014 Instrumentalist of the Year award. Equally accomplished as a performer and a raconteur, Denk peppers his recitals with inimitably insightful commentary. The New Yorker’s music journalist, Alex Ross, has praised him for his “arresting sensitivity and wit,” calling him “the liveliest writer-pianist since Glenn Gould.”
Violinist Stefan Jackiw had been hailed for playing of “uncommon musical substance…striking for its intelligence and sensitivity.” He is recognized as one of his generation’s most exciting violinists, captivating audiences with playing that combines poetry and purity with an impeccable technique.
An excerpt from Jeremy Denk’s January, 2012, New Yorker article about the music of Charles Ives: Click here to read the entire article.
“[In the Ives sonata], I was puzzled about where this phrase was going. I’d been taught that phrases were supposed to go somewhere, yet this musical moment seemed serenely determined to wander nowhere.
One afternoon, the violinist of the group and I were driving off campus and happened to cross the Connecticut River. Looking out of the window, he said, “You should play it like that.” From the bridge the river seemed impossibly wide, and instead of a single current there seemed to be a million intersecting currents — urgent and lazy rivers within the river, magical pockets of no motion at all. The late-afternoon light colored the water pink and orange and gold. It was the most beautiful, patient, meandering multiplicity.
Instantly, I knew how to play the passage. Even better, Ives’s music made me see rivers differently; centuries of classical music had prettified them, ignoring their reality in order to turn them into musical objects. Schubert uses tuneful flowing brooks to murmur comfort to suicidal lovers; Wagner has maidens and fateful rings at the bottom of a heroically surging Rhine. Ives is different. He gives you crosscurrents, dirt, haze — the disorder of a zillion particles crawling downstream. His rivers aren’t constrained by human desires and stories; they sing the beauty of their own randomness and drift.”