Three Centuries of Keyboard Music On Jeremy Denk’s Recital Program
Har r y Haskell
Tonight’s concert surveys the evolution of the keyboard r epertoire from the dance-oriented suites of the Baroque era to the quasi-symphonic character pieces of the 19th century and the relentlessly experimental idioms of the 20th. The half-dozen English Suites that Bach wrote early in his career helped lay the foundation for his four-volume Clavier-Übung (“Keyboard Practice”), a magisterial compendium of contemporary keyboard styles, genres, and forms. Building on Bach’s foundation, the Romantic composer- pianists created a new kind of music for the piano, compounded of heroic virtuosity and poetic intimacy. Schumann dedicated his great C-major Fantasy to Liszt, whose innovative forms, harmonies, and sonorities anticipated the musical language of impressionism and modernism. Berg, born a year before Liszt’s death, tempered the concentrated intensity of the modernist idiom with a freer Romantic impulse. Two generations later, Ligeti composed piano music of singular density and complexity based on what he called “simple structures of rhythms and sounds.” Dances and Etudes In the years before he moved to Leipzig in 1723, Johann S ebastian Bach wrote a number of didactic works for the clavier (the generic German term for a keyboard instrument at the time),
