Finding Empathy through Music: A Recital by Jeremy Denk

SUPPLEMENT TO THE ASPEN TIMES MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2021 VOL 31, NO. 8

Finding Empathy through Music: A Recital by Jeremy Denk

JESSICA MOORE

AMFS Director of Marketing

When pianist Jeremy Denk takes the stage at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) on Thursday, August 19 for a solo recital in the Benedict Music Tent, audiences can expect to be whisked away on a musical tour that, while seemingly unusual, is impeccably crafted and interconnected. Such program construction is typical of Denk, an artist whom Asadour Santourian, AMFS’s vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor, calls “a polymath. The guy’s a genius.”

Fittingly, Denk is the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the Avery Fisher Prize, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “Jeremy Denk, my God, one can hardly categorize him as just a pianist,” says Santourian. “He’s a pundit, he’s an author, a defender of music, a promoter of music.”

It is through these various lenses that Denk imagines his Aspen recital program, which begins with Bach’s Partita No. 5 in G major—a work that he describes as “one of the most joyous possible pieces to play.” In what Denk hopes will serve as an “escape from the pandemic blues,” he characterizes this partita as “one of the funniest pieces by Bach, and one of the most outlandishly creative; you can really feel his genial invention in it.”

In contrast with this light and sunny material, Denk has chosen to close the program with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, op. 111—the final work the composer wrote for the piano. Denk says this sonata, “feels like a reflection from a late age, reevaluating everything that Beethoven has done in a way and trying to re-understand it, or re-contextualize it.”

From the opening of the first movement, one hears the composer speeding up and slowing down, as if stuck in “restless circles and spirals” before reaching a conclusion in the final movement that Denk says “presents this unbelievable and unfathomable solution to the whole impasse, something that has never really before been seen in terms of music, rhythm, and its timescale, which is endless.”

Sandwiched in between the works of these two musical titans is a suite of pieces ranging from the Romantic period to the twentieth century that Santourian calls a “travelogue,” explaining, “It’s always hard to limit Jeremy to a program because he has so much to say and so much to offer.”

In the Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues by Frederic Rzewski, Denk see a similar “epiphany” as in Beethoven’s Opus 111. The piece begins with the sounds of the cotton mill, “the sheer, relentless, brutal machine pounding in,” before “gradually the blues begin to burst out and take over,” in what Denk describes as “an incredible sense that the tune conquers the evil of the machine. Humanity wins out.”

Denk also selected works by the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, the unlikely piano phenom of the 1800s, born into slavery; and a ragtime collaboration between composers Louis Chauvin and Scott Joplin.

“One of the things I find so important about a lot of this music is empathy,” says Denk. “Either the performer empathizing with the composer, or the composer universally empathizing with all of us, trying to capture the human emotional spectrum in musical tones.”

Pianist Jeremy Denk presents a wide-ranging recital of piano works on Thursday, August 19, in the Benedict Music Tent.

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