VoxCarnyx

Dunbar Parish Church

It is, as the Lammermuir Festival’s James Waters pointed out, unusual to see a musician selling their books rather than their recordings at performances. As a hardback is less concealable than a CD, it was also obvious how many were bought, but then Jeremy Denk’s Every Good Boy Does Fine is well worth the read – and “a love story in music lessons” that is tailor-made for his faithful following at the Lammermuir Festival.

By dint of being the star visitor of the event’s return to live operations last year, Denk has swiftly become Lammermuir’s golden boy, and this was the first of five appearances (including a non-playing book-plugging one) in the 2022 programme, two as an orchestral soloist (Brahms on Saturday with the RSNO, Beethoven a week on Monday with the Royal Northern Sinfonia) and one with violinist Maria Wloszczowska, playing Bach.

For the book-buying fans, his opening solo recital was the most personal and idiosyncratic. As he probably says everywhere, his promise to write programme notes had again come to naught (although Lammermuir programme editor David Lee provided another view of the works) so he chose to deliver his thoughts verbally, which is part of the attraction of his appearances. These are a mixture of historical context and musical illumination, and always worth hearing, but his personable delivery and wit are as important – Denk makes his listeners want to open their ears before he plays a note.

He’s some player though, which is the important thing. Opening with Mozart’s A Minor Sonata, K310, here was a reading of the rollercoaster of the composer’s emotions, the register of mood and pitch in constant flux. Perhaps there are pianists with more delicate Mozart, but few with Denk’s passion and commitment – or speed at some points.

The technically-challenging is meat and drink to him, as the full-on pianism of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, which followed, demonstrated. It’s a huge piece, but not short on humour when the gloomy tolling of Le Gibet is followed by the mischief of the gremlin Scarbo. Denk has a habit of turning to the audience at such moments, the expression of the music written on his face, and sometimes almost with an open-eyed look of surprise that the audience is still there.

The pianist spoke less after the interval, but his choice of programme said more. Concluding with Beethoven’s big Opus 109 Sonata, which references the Baroque keyboard style of Bach in the last movement, it began with a Toccata by the earlier composer, played on the Steinway in an expressive style that Bach could surely never have imagined. Between those two sat the recent American Pianist’s Association competition piece Heartbreaker, by Breaking the Waves composer Missy Mazzoli, and the fiendish Ligeti Etude, The Devil’s Staircase, both demonstrations of the capabilities of a modern grand – in the right hands.

It was show-off stuff, but delivered with something approaching no-sweat New York nonchalance. The bulk of the music was played from memory, but Waters found himself called upon to turn the electronic pages of Denk’s tablet computer for the dense modern works. Plaudits to him for being just as relaxed.

Keith Bruce

Dunbar Parish Church

Had Jeremy Denk’s second solo recital as artist-in-residence at this year’s Lammermuir Festival consisted solely of Bach’s Partita No 5 in G Major and Beethoven’s remarkable final piano sonata, the Opus 111 in C Minor, few would have complained.

Both works are, in their very different ways, explorations of the nature of time. Denk strode on to the platform and was straight down to business with the Bach, although piano-playing for him is clearly more on the “pleasure” side of the equation – and he is eager to share the joy. His internal metronome is calibrated precisely enough that he can ease the strict tempo as the work unfolds and allow a little elasticity in movements that may be based on dance rhythms but were never intended for dancing.

The Beethoven, on the other hand, was eloquently introduced, its contrasting movements, in the pianist’s phrase, “a vision of one thing, and its antidote”, a remembrance of the past and a picture of the future so bold that there was nothing more the composer could say in this form. Denk gave the work an unforgettable probing performance, constantly moving with the fluid currents of the writing with an obvious reluctance to give in to any obvious “hook” in mere repetition.

However, it was what came between these two masterworks that elevated the concert to classic status. The suite of four pieces that Denk had assembled, in the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests around the globe, began with London-born Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s treatment of the African-American tune They will not lend me a child and culminated in Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues from the late 1970s. It is an astonishing piece of post-minimalist expressionism that uses the full power of a grand piano in its motorik exploration of the dignity of labour as well as its trials.

The Coleridge-Taylor was followed by another remarkable work in “Blind Tom” Wiggins’s The Battle of Manassas, which re-creates, with samples and dialogue, an event in the American Civil War and, while more of a music-hall turn, is only slightly less creative in the use of the instrument, yet was written a full century before.

The cacophony of the battlefield was still dying away when Denk segued into Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin, the latter being a black ragtime composer who has the dubious honour of beating bluesman Robert Johnson to membership of the “27 Club” by 30 years, and Jimi Hendrix by more than another 30.

The earlier works were all effectively a pathway to the Rzewski, whose work is surely now ripe for reappraisal following his death at the end of June this year, at 83. Denk’s timely and thoughtful placing of it here was the ideal start.

Keith Bruce

Dunbar Parish Church

Having long been a fan of New York-based pianist Jeremy Denk’s thoughtful recordings for the Nonesuch label, and learning only recently that I had missed three chances over the past decade to see him perform a mere 30 miles from my home, his arrival as artist-in-residence at this year’s Lammermuir Festival is a particular delight.

It turns out that Denk, who is becoming as noted a wordsmith as he is a musician, is a wonderfully characterful performer. His opening concert, of Book One of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, may technically have been his first public performance of the work from memory, but his opening remarks made clear that these are pieces he has known since childhood. The parallel he drew between his own stern father over-seeing his keyboard practice and Papa Bach’s position as the architect of Western music may have been personal, but it perfectly set up his playing of what are some of the best-known opening bars of music in the canon. For those whose first re-acquaintance with live music this was, they could not fail to be especially moving.

Playing this music is also a perfect match for the memoir of music lessons and teachers that Denk has been working on. Even listeners much less musically-literate than him can hear in Bach’s progression through the notated keys, and in playing that progressed from intimate to expansive over the course of the evening, the building blocks of composition. For the young pianist the Preludes and Fugues develop mental agility as much as manual dexterity as themes swap between the hands, or span both. It is like listening to Lego in the hands of a master-builder.

And if that suggests a certain playfulness in Denk’s approach, that is exactly correct. He found intimations of the cartoon music of Raymond Scott and Carl Stalling at points, as well as reminders that pianists from Jacques Loussier to Brad Mehldau have found jazz inspiration in Bach’s works.

More than that, and although he is far from being a flamboyant performer, Denk is apt to cast a knowing glance at the audience to be sure we are not missing a little musical joke, and his facial expressions are often in limpid contrast to the frenetic fingering going on. Technically brilliant, his playing is never “clinical”, as the sports-reporting cliché would have it, with an occasional buzzing string or foot stomp all part of the evening.

Having waited a while to see him live, the other pianist Denk occasionally brought to mind was the late Dudley Moore, who may be better known for his comedy and films, but was a damned fine jazz piano-player. In a very similar way, Denk is clearly entirely in his element at the keyboard.

Keith Bruce