The Courage to Play Beethoven Like Jeremy Denk

Year 2, Week 11, in one pianists' journey to perform the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven.

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always”. – Arthur Miller

This past Thursday, December 12 at 7:30 PM EST, meaning at 8:30 on my Island, the pianist and writer Jeremy Denk presented a massive and mighty solo piano recital program in Manhattan at the 92^nd Street Y. It was livestreamed, so I tuned in.

I have such a conflicted reaction to this person. Above all, I admire and love his work. Or maybe, above all I’m jealous of his work. Blessedly, the conflict is productive. For instance, it was after reading his memoir Every Good Boy Does Fine that I got motivated to start this blog. After all, he had worked up to his memoir by writing a blog. He wrote fine essays too: years earlier, I’d printed out the one in the New Yorker about his process of recording the Charles Ives “Concord” Sonata. It lay in my teaching studio and I’d peruse it during breaks.

Jeremy Denk came on stage with a light-footed gait and a sardonic grin that belied, almost put air quotes around, his weighty program. Without comment, he launched into Beethoven’s Sonata No. 90 in E minor.

I’m performing that work on Monday evening.

I’m writing and sending this week’s blog on Friday, before Sunday, because on Sunday, I play the first of two all-Beethoven concerts, Sunday and Monday in Waterloo.

I haven’t met Denk in person. But here’s what makes him different from just a distant colleague for me: we both count as a profound formative influence the great pianist-teacher György Sebők, with whom we both studied for many years. At different times, though, so we don’t know each other. Denk is 10 years younger than me.

Sebők used to say that while he often couldn’t remember pianists’ names, he remembered their playing. Not only can I remember Denk’s playing on Thursday night, I remember Sebők’s playing through Denk. I also see Sebők’s inimitable teaching through Denk.

I spent countless hours between 1978-1990 scrutinizing Sebők as he taught others. As someone brought up on a remote island without enough access to the music world, I was hungry for his culture and wisdom and devoured his approach and philosophy. I was constantly trying to figure out how – and why – Sebők was so carefully re-balancing impetuous young pianists, re-calibrating their techniques and setting them on a path to the fulfilment of their unique promise.

Denk’s Beethoven is so different from mine. Here’s the mark of Sebők’s greatness as a teacher: two of his students have each been given the capacity to digest and present a work that he hasn’t necessarily even taught them, in such a way that they can fully manifest their own inimitable perspective.

Also, both of them tend to mess up. And go on. Just like Sebők always did in his own concerts.

I forget who it was that said, “If you get all the right notes, you’re concentrating on the wrong thing.”

Put another way, musicianship involves not being afraid to be ugly in the service of art. Sebők taught humanity through art. He modelled it in his playing that always felt vulnerable, capable of turning on a dime towards some new idea even if it meant dropping a few notes on the turn.

This takes courage. I have not been feeling brave, lately, about my upcoming concerts. Denk’s approach gave me courage. It reminded me of how I myself had been “encouraged” by Sebők.

Denk’s Beethoven Opus 90 is more agitated than mine. Beethoven is famous for writing sudden, often awkward, emphatic accents into his tunes. Denk took the first one of these accents and shook it by the scruff of its neck in such an irascible manner that I was instantly reminded of Beethoven the man. Yes! It could have happened that way!

In Denk, I can imagine the young pianist who first presented himself to Sebők. I see, in the lamplight of Sebők’s studio, a thought-obsessed person, sometimes forgetting to remember he was also playing the piano, until he tripped over some technical challenge that might throw him into despondency, until his ironic humour brought him back into his circle of thoughts, but then again he would forget the body… Sebők knew exactly what such a person needed. He had a catalog full of analogies and stories to employ, first to capture the young man’s active mind, then to create channels for it to reliably access and manifest its thoughts in grounded physical action.

“Imagine a water tap where only a trickle is coming out”, he might say. “You are seeing very little water, but there is great pressure behind the tap.” He’d pause. Okay, you’d think. What does this have to do with Beethoven? He’d go on. “If you are the water, you feel very intense, but the audience is not getting why you feel that way. You have to figure out where in the pipes there is a block. Then when you remove it, you might feel like the music is less intense or passionate, but the audience will feel much greater intensity.” He would proceed to figure out where the block was.

Or blocks. They could be in the mechanics of shoulders, wrist, lower back, feet, eye. Once he even, memorably to us laughing students, talked about one’s kidneys having to resonate.

We laughed a lot in that class; Sebők had a world-class, subtle sense of humour. I suspect him of choosing students partly based on ability to participate in this humour.

György Sebők

Jeremy Denk talking to the audience

Denk has retained the lively facial expressions that signal a mind at work – but as a pianist, I can see where Sebők removed the blocks that may once have prevented all that – so much! – from flowing out into the piano and the hall. Denk needs to have a lively style of motion to release his many thoughts, and he does, but just watch his dropped, relaxed shoulders, watch his grounded feet and seatedness on the bench, watch his calm hands resting on the keys. There you see the gifts of Sebők’s masterful mechanics of technique-building.

After Denk’s Beethoven – wistful, wry, poetic, faster than mine – he stood up to talk with the audience about the rest of his program. He didn’t say so, but you could see that he himself was following the example that Ives had set for him, and that Beethoven had set for Ives. This was to democratize the entire enterprise of a piano concert. Denk had programmed some Joplin, some Nina Simone, American voices, to answer in fine democratic form to the Beethoven. Then, after playing these, not necessarily as a native speaker of jazz but with great warmth and empathy, he plowed right back into Beethoven, this time with the Opus 110 sonata.

That juxtapostion worked. Denk brought a poetic agony to that sonata’s operatic drama that, in the context of just having listened to short salon works, reminded me of Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas”. It was breathtakingly genuine, with not one gram of pretention. He managed to take one out of the world of the proper classical pianist and into that of, say, Billy Joel’s Piano Man, along a direct route to the heart.

After intermission, Denk spoke a bit about the American 20^th century composer Charle Ives’s “Concord” sonata and then played that towering work. By now, it was after 10 PM for me, and I had to conserve energy for a long-distance drive, flight, and two concerts. I gave it my best shot, but 10 minutes into the 45-plus-minute work, I had to sign off. There’s already a great live YouTube of Denk performing it years ago in the same venue, and I resolved to listen another time. It’s one of those American artworks that mines the meaning of American democracy – a proper subject for these times. But I had promises to keep, and miles to go after getting some sleep.

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