Charles Ives at 150: Jeremy Denk plays the piano works

  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Monday October 14, 2024
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Pianist Jeremy Denk
Pianist Jeremy Denk

My favorite Charles Ives quote dates from 1931, when the composer was in New York for the first public performance of his "Three Places in New England." It was hissed and booed, but Ives seemed unperturbed.

But when an audience member shouted his displeasure at "Men and Mountains," by Ives' friend Carl Ruggles, Ives stood up and chastised the man: "You goddam sissy...when you hear strong masculine music like this, get up and use your ears like a man!"

The exclamation falls as hard on our present-day ears as Ives' challenging music did on the ears of the outraged ticket-buyer. The fact that Ives' rebuke is recorded in a number of ways hints that it might be apocryphal. Fact or fiction, Ives' point is clear: fully hearing his music requires listeners to stretch their artistic, non-anatomical inner ears.

Today, an Ives piece on the program can be the reason an audience goes to a concert. And no one worth listening to calls anyone a sissy. Now one sure route to Ives' "masculine music" is the playing of out pianist Jeremy Denk, author of the rightly praised memoir, "Every Good Boy Does Fine."

In honor of Ives' 150th birth anniversary, Nonesuch is releasing a two-disc set of Denk's previous recordings of the Violin Sonatas, with Stefan Jackiw, and, newly re-mastered, his manly 2010 recording of the piano sonatas, climaxing with the fiercely tender "Concord" Sonata.

Pianist Jeremy Denk  

Cranky Yankee
One of the glories of the set is Denk's commentary about the pieces. Don't hold your breath, but the recording industry has promised that henceforth the "booklets" included with CD releases will also become available on the streaming formats. If Denk's exemplary essay, written not just as "liner notes" but as an Ives tribute for this year's celebration of 150th anniversary of the composer's birth, doesn't make the new cut (it hasn't so far), a great opportunity will be lost.

These comments on the program come from Denk's deep experience performing the pieces live and repeatedly over time, with the inevitable new perspectives and changes of interpretive attack.

His insights into the inner workings of the "Concord" Sonata are introduced, sagely, by the response Denk received when he asked the Ives proponent, Gilbert Kalish, to teach him the piece. Kalish said it was "unteachable" because of the infinite number of interpretive possibilities.

That's in keeping with the climate of these recordings, which offer virtuosic, thought-through performances that never stray far from the seemingly improvisational nature of the music. And if you stick with the essay to the end, you'll see Denk calling Ives the "cranky Yankee," which is as usefully explanatory as it is infested with Ives' own quick, sometimes sardonic rapier wit.


Strings attached
The inclusion of the four violin sonatas, played in reverse order as is the wont of Denk and his colleague, violinist Stefan Jackiw, is more illuminating than album-filling. A paraphrase (and simplification) of Denk's rationale is that, with the last, Ives demonstrates his capacity to write real, if hardly conventional, "European music," albeit with piano gestures the Europeans would have found farcical if not outright offensive. By the time the duo arrives at the First Sonata, the halting, then driving manifestations of the sheer, fundamental wildness of Ives are exclaimed.

Ives' quotes and deliberate misquotes of tunes any knowledgeable American listener would both recognize and be startled by, so characteristic of Ives' music, abound. His working over of the hymn "Watchman, Tell Us of the Night" in the Third Sonata points to its even more potent deployment in the Fourth Symphony. Here is Denk the commentator at his best: The then-familiar tune "starts out in the guise of ragtime, and visits several styles, before finally becoming itself: an aching, yearning hymn."

The standard violin sonata is not where an inquisitive listener would go to hear marches, but they stomp through much of Ives' music and get some of their earliest orders in these sonatas. The duo wrestles the daunting technical challenges of these bustling pieces while never straying far from their sometimes biting humor.


We come to the river
The solo piano music on the second disc simply astonishes. The thorny, unsettled, restless, rambunctious strains of the First Sonata, with its underlying musical palindrome, is achieved in what has to be called a definitive performance, however many other views of the piece lie hidden.

The Second Sonata, "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860," which skirts unplayability at times, is itself finally as transcendent as the American transcendentalists, explorers of the "oversoul," that lend their names to the four movements: Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts, and Thoreau.

Dense and referential as the music is — more folk tunes, hymns, marches, and quotations of "European" works such as Beethoven's Fifth and Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" peek out of the packed textures — for the listener willing to surrender to it, it's spellbinding.

Each movement has its distinctive character, with departures and digressions, but it is the second,"Hawthorne" that announces its primacy from the start. Denk calls it "a giant dark joke and prank, with a ghostly aura." The music is as weird as the author it salutes, but it moves like ocean swells and testimonials of faith.

The playing is jaw-dropping. Denk juggles musical ideas like a circus performer. To say that he displays independence of the hands is both accurate and somehow an understatement. What are passing dissonances and even quarter-tones in the violin sonatas here hint at prepared-piano sonorities and provide vivid examples of cluster chords.

It's a work that benefits greatly from Denk's verbal guide through its complex, sometimes perplexing strains. But in Denk's gravity-defying hands, the music is as compelling as it is often overwhelming.


Fringe performances
Denk the pianist is a polyglot. He dispatches Ives as if to the manner born, but his work with more traditional, less outlandish fare demonstrates his own special knack with "European" music.

A nearly simultaneous release is of the Mendelssohn piano trios, in which he is kept particularly busy, with longtime collaborators, violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis (Sony Classical). Throughout their playing has the scope and drive of Mendelssohn's best chamber music, and the Third Trio will simply sweep you away.

Simone Dinnestein has always gone her own way as a pianist. If there's music that demands and rewards such individual musicianship it's the "Concord" Sonata, and she celebrates it on "The Eye Is the First Circle" (Supertrain Records), another acute, absorbing take on the sprawling, deeply moving work.

Jeremy Denk, "Ives/Denk," Jeremy Denk, pianist, with violinist Stephan Jackiw, two CDs and streaming, Nonesuch Records.
www.nonesuch.com
www.jeremydenk.com


Felix Mendelssohn, Piano Trios, Jeremy Denk, Joshua Bell, and Stephen Issleris, one CD and streaming, Sony Classical. www.sonyclassical.com


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