Avery Fisher Prize-Winner Jeremy Denk Gives Recital in Barbican Festival (May 24) and Serves as Music Director of 2014 Ojai Music Festival (June 12–15)

On the heels of his momentous Avery Fisher Prize win last month, Jeremy Denk performs Bach’s Goldberg Variations and selections from Ligeti’s Études in London’s historic LSO St. Luke’s church on May 24. Presented as part of the Barbican Centre’s month-long festival celebrating “Explorations: The Sound of Nonesuch Records,” Denk’s recital program recalls his two hit releases for the groundbreaking label: Ligeti/Beethoven, named one of the “Best of 2012” by the New Yorker, NPR, and the Washington Post, and Bach: Goldberg Variations, which reached number one on Billboard’s Classical Chart and made “Best of 2013” lists in the New Yorker and the New York Times. Next Denk heads to Southern California for the 2014 Ojai Music Festival, where, as Music Director of the 68^th season, he looks forward to performing, speaking, curating, and presiding over the world premiere production of The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts), a comic opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky, set to a libretto by the pianist himself. As the Wall Street Journal observes, “of all America’s up-and-coming classical instrumentalists, Jeremy Denk, the pianist-blogger who won a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’ in September, might well be the most interesting.”

The upcoming London recital showcases Denk in two of his signature works. “Ligeti’s deliberately written things that are going to screw with your mind,” the pianist explains, yet his way with the Hungarian composer’s formidable Études consistently draws praise. “Honest and rounded humanity define these performances…a marvel,” declared BBC Music in a five-star review of Ligeti/Beethoven. The San Francisco Chronicle found the Nonesuch album “sharp-edged, fierce and electrifying,” the Observer called it “dazzling,” while NPR’s Anastasia Tsioulcas affirmed: “Denk plays masterfully, opening up each puzzle box in turn with vitality, wit and absolute assurance.” In live performance, as the New York Times discovered, his reading of the Études left “audience members grasping for superlatives.”

Despite presenting one of the most beloved, challenging, and oft-recorded works in the keyboard literature, Denk’s recording of Bach’s transcendent Goldberg Variations has inspired comparable awe. According to the San Francisco Chronicle,

“He brings out all the beauty and ingenuity of the music. The transparency of the counterpoint, the rhetorical fervor of the melodic passages, even the dark splendor of the set’s few minor-key movements – all these qualities and more come through in glorious, maddening brilliance.”

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout admired Denk’s “striking blend of deeply considered expression and total technical command,” concluding: “I find Mr. Denk’s interpretation of the ‘Goldbergs’ to be enthrallingly involving. He is one of our finest musical minds.” Denk’s season-launching “Goldbergs” concert tour found similar favor. His appearance at Chicago’s Symphony Center was hailed as one of the fall’s ten best classical events by Time Out Chicago, which dubbed him a “klavier blackbelt,” and  prompted the Chicago Tribune to reflect: “Few of today’s important concert pianists have pondered J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations as deeply, written about the piece as extensively, or play it as exuberantly, as Jeremy Denk.” 

Before the London recital, the pianist will introduce a screening of his new DVD, Liner Notes to the Goldbergs, which accompanies his recording of the work, and after the performance he will give an interview on stage. The Barbican’s month-long tribute to Nonesuch Records also features appearances by such label-mates of Denk’s as the Kronos Quartet, Emmylou Harris, and Natalie Merchant.

There surely can be few readers of The Classical Style, the late Charles Rosen’s National Book Award-winning masterpiece of musical scholarship, who find themselves struck by its operatic potential. Yet Denk has taken the seminal text as the inspiration for his first libretto, the basis for a comic opera titled The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts), in which roles range from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to “a preening musicologist,” a bartender, and the “ongoing love triangle” of the tonic, dominant, and subdominant. With music by American composer Steven Stucky, whose Second Concerto for Orchestra won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and whose August 4, 1964 was a 2013 Grammy nominee for “Best Contemporary Classical Composition,” the resulting opera – a co-commission of the Ojai Music Festival, Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and the Aspen Music Festival – receives its world premiere at the 2014 Ojai Music Festival on June 13. All the roles will be shared between eight singers, with the support of Atlanta Symphony’s Robert Spano conducting The Knights, the innovative NYC-based orchestra collective hailed as “the future of classical music in America” (Los Angeles Times) that will be in residence throughout the festival. As a curtain raiser before the opera, string quartet Brooklyn Rider will play Haydn’s “Rider” Quartet, and earlier that day Denk will talk about Charles Rosen and take part in a panel discussion on The Classical Style.

This kind of imaginative engagement with the music of the past is one of the principle themes underlying Denk’s curatorship as Music Director of the 2014 Ojai Music Festival. He rejoins The Knights for the world premiere of 140 characters or less, a new commission from Andrew Norman in which the Rome Prize-winning composer takes up Denk’s challenge “to pay another call on Schumann and Mozart,” alongside a recomposition of Mozart’s Coronation Concerto by Timo Andres (June 14); collaborates with Uri Caine and his ensemble on the Grammy-nominated jazz pianist/composer’s own Mahler Re-Imagined, as well as on selections from Janácek and Schubert (June 12); and is responsible for devising “a salvo of musical canons, old and new, silly and serious” by Josquin, Purcell, Haydn, Mozart, Schumann, Bartók, PDQ Bach, and Thomas Adès, which The Knights will perform on a program bookended by Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and Caine’s arrangement of the Goldbergs (June 15). Ojai also finds Denk playing Ives sonatas with violinist Jennifer Frautschi (June 14) and reprising Ligeti’s Études before taking part in Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy” with The Knights and the Ojai Festival Singers in the festival’s closing concert (June 15). Other highlights of Denk’s Ojai curatorship include The Knights playing Boccherini, Ives, Feldman, Stockhausen, and Weill (June 14); Brooklyn Rider’s rendition of quartets by Schubert, Philip Glass, Evan Ziporyn, and the group’s own Colin Jacobsen (June 14); and the Uri Caine Sextet playing Gershwin as reimagined and improvised by Caine (June 13).

In addition, Denk serves as Music Director of the fourth Ojai North! festival (June 19-21) at the University of California, Berkeley, of which the centerpiece will be the Bay Area premiere of The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts) on June 20 and 21.

Spring also takes the pianist to Brazil for his São Paulo Symphony debut with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (May 1-3). Beethoven’s concerto, of which the Detroit Free Press found Denk’s to be “the most viscerally exciting, emotionally absorbing, and intellectually rich account” that the reviewer had “ever heard in concert,” is also the vehicle for his collaboration with Jeffrey Kahane and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (May 17 & 18). In recital, Denk joins Steven Isserlis for a program of music for cello and piano by Hahn, Chopin, Martinu, Liszt, and Franck at New York’s 92^nd Street Y (April 26), before offering his “downright seductive” (Washington Post) interpretation of Ives’s thorny “Concord” Sonatain São Paulo (April 30).

After his Ojai residency, Denk looks forward to a full summer of festivals, playing Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Saratoga Springs (Aug 7) and Bartók’s Third at California’s Music Academy of the West (July 12), besides pairing the “Concord” Sonata with the Goldberg Variations for solo recitals at Tanglewood (Aug 13), Aspen (July 23) and Rockport (June 29).

These engagements crown a truly sensational season for the pianist, who was awarded a 2013 MacArthur “genius grant” and named Musical America’s 2014 Instrumentalist of the Year last fall, as well as winning the 2014 Avery Fisher Prize in March. At Carnegie Hall with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas, he proved himself a “superb soloist …, exuding personality, teasing out humor with widely varied touch and articulation” (New York Times), while his recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations topped the Billboard classical chart and was named one of the “Best of 2013” by the New Yorker and the New York Times. For his work as a writer and pianist, Out magazine included Denk on its “Out 100” list celebrating the most compelling people of 2013. As the Baltimore Sun recently remarked, “He’s one of the most engaging keyboard artists of our time.”

More information on Denk’s upcoming engagements can be found below, further details are available on his web site: jeremydenk.net, and high-resolution photos are available here.

Jeremy Denk: spring and summer engagements

April 26

New York, NY

Tisch Center/ 92^nd St Y

Concert with Steven Isserlis, cello

Hahn, Chopin, Martinu, Liszt & Franck

April 30

São Paulo, Brazil

Sala São Paulo

Ives: “Concord” Sonata

May 1-3

São Paulo, Brazil

São Paulo Symphony (debut)

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 in C, Op. 15

May 17

Glendale, CA

The Alex Theater

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra / Jeffrey Kahane

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 in C, Op. 15

May 18

Los Angeles, CA

Royce Hall

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra / Jeffrey Kahane

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 in C, Op. 15

May 24

London, England

Barbican Centre

LSO St. Lukes

Ligeti: Études

Bach: Goldberg Variations

June 12-15

Ojai, CA

Ojai Music Festival, music director

June 19–21

Berkeley, CA

Ojai North!, music director

June 29

Rockport, MA

Rockport Music Festival

Ives: “Concord” Sonata

Bach: Goldberg Variations

July 12

Santa Barbara, CA

Music Academy of the West

Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3

July 15

Santa Barbara, CA

Music Academy of the West

Recital

July 23

Aspen, CO

Aspen Music Festival

Ives: “Concord” Sonata

Bach: Goldberg Variations

Aug 7

Saratoga Springs, NY

Philadelphia Orchestra

Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 in C, Op. 15

Aug 13

Lenox, MA

Tanglewood Festival

Boston Symphony Orchestra

Ives: “Concord” Sonata

Bach: Goldberg Variations