spotlight: jeremy denk
I really enjoyed reading about your views on breaking down that veil. In my experience that is a rare quality. I think a lot of people are attached to the varnish
of it all, if you know what I mean. They want the painting to look old. (Laughs) I don’t want the painting to look old—I want us to get it right now— in the moment. I don’t think that Beethoven wanted his symphony to sound varnished either. Most of the music we all love in the classic tradition was revolutionary for its time, in some way or another. I guess for me, a lot of those revolutions don’t have an expiration date on them, they continue to be that… I think Shakespeare was revolutionary. I remember seeing Ian McKellan in Richard III at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, it completely changed my perspective on Shakespeare. That’s fantastic! It’s very important to me…
that whole quality of reinvention. For me, there is no reason to play Beethoven, if it doesn’t sound unsettling. He was the great unsettler. (Laughs) Sebők was very good at creating circumstances in which you heard the piece in a totally new way. Sometimes you practice a piece and circle around and around, with the same habits you have known. You try to find a way out, into something that is new. That happens a lot for me and it’s very frustrating. When you know there is something that you’re missing and you don’t know what it is. You have also talked about finding the humor in music; it was something that really struck me. Can you talk about that a bit more? There are so many ways in which humor plays
a central role in the classical style; it’s almost criminal to not talk about it. There is a sort of discomfort for irreverence, so I guess it causes people to sometimes forget the concept. It’s what we all want from classical music in a way—a noble experience—we want it to be above the “normal.” I did a talk at The New Yorker Festival about Seinfeld and Mozart and talked about how certain timings in classical music are very similar to comedic timing and how important that becomes in music. What those jokes do to us as human beings. Through surprise and unexpectedness, they lift us out of normal life and that’s incredibly important. I’ve enjoyed reading your blog and viewing your master classes. You are very articulate when you communicate. I’m curious, is that a talent that you developed, or has it always been innate?
I looked back at my writing when I was 16 or 17,
which of course, was god-awful. (Laughs) But, I sure had a lot to say and I really wanted to say it. It was really through a wonderful English teacher at Oberlin that I began to refine the gift. Sort of a “You made a great phrase there. But, do you actually think it’s true?” A really fascinating, really important criterion… (Laughs). Does it actually describe the thing that I’m feeling about this poem or what these words do? It’s very similar to piano playing and practicing
too. How does it work—how does a phrase work— why does this note come sooner and this one later? What’s the really surprising note, what’s the most beautiful note? How do you draw that out, how do you make it speak without overdoing it. The similarities between the way in which you write and interpret music are very apparent. It’s the same person, one who is looking for epiphany, looking for a connection. Sometimes one tendency will be prevalent, or a composer will suddenly be the one that I want to play more desperately than the other. For a while it was Mozart, there is something about how his music is constantly changeable. There is a wonderful generosity there, but also wit and a kind of childish wonder. Those things are things that I like to have in my life. Tell us a little bit about your concert in San Diego, you have four dates here and I see that Janáček is on the menu. Janáček’s Capriccio for Piano (for the Left
Hand), a piece that I
love...It’s very difficult and very awkward. It’s amazing because you have a pianist with one hand, basically the person it was composed for lost an arm in the war. Janáček writes the most sublime, weird and desperate music for
him to play. The piano struggles against the limita- tions of itself and then it builds to such outrageous, ecstatic places. I’ve always thought this piece was so beautiful and so impossible at the same time. It is a fascinating work. There are echoes of it in some of Gershwin’s symphonic works. It’s that late romantic harmony that transitions
into jazz harmonies and there is an interesting, weird interface there. They use the same wacko cords (laughs) that sort of modulate everywhere… Janáček loves to do that. It is so haunting when he does and the harmonies turn light or dark depending on what he does with them. That’s what he loved, the sense of the light and the dark, both emotionally and spiritually. He loved to put you on that plane, the place where it was ambiguous and ambivalent… a desperate place torn between two options. I could discuss this for hours, the motivations and emotion behind the music. I try my best to talk about those things—some-
times it takes me a while. Especially when I write about music, to find the perfect phrase that doesn’t have any fat in it. When you write about music, there is always the temptation of jargon. To explain it in those terms—which many times—doesn’t tell anyone anything. Turning it into something that everyone can understand is the hard part.
Jeremy Denk will be the San Diego Symphony as a part of their Upright and Grand Piano Festival. He will perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 on Friday, January 15 at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts and again on Saturday and Sunday, January 16 and 17 at Copley Symphony Hall in Downtown San Diego. On Tuesday, January 19, Denk will also perform Janáček’s Capriccio for Piano (for the Left Hand), again with the symphony. For tickets and more information, call 619.235.0804 or go to
sandiegosymphony.org.
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RAGE monthly | JANUARY 2016
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