Being a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius†Award gives you multiple opportunities and a cash prize of $625,000. But one can only get around to those opportunities when one’s  schedule permits. Such is the dilemma for classical pianist Jeremy Denk. Amongst the things that were already on his docket were finishing a book, recording obligations and completing concert tours. One such tour brings him to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday with a program featuring works by Mozart, Prokofiev, Beethoven and Schubert.
Denk, who has had perhaps every possible superlative used to describe his playing, had just arrived in the Palm Springs area for a concert that found him playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #5 when we spoke by phone.
Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives is one of only three samples that appear on your website. What is it about this particular piece that warrants not just that sample on your site, but the playing of the complete cycle in recital?
It’s been awhile since I’ve updated my website. I think I had a fond memory of that performance. I learned the piece for the Bard Festival where they do one composer each year. I had always loved the piece because I heard Prokofiev himself play it. It opened my eyes to something in his music that I hadn’t seen, but was there. His playing uses tremendous vibrato, a lot of pedal, color and imagination. Once I heard him, I knew how I wanted to go at that music. And you don’t hear them as a complete set that often and I think they deserve it.
One of your music teachers, György Sebők, talked to you about what you referred to as “the daily rite that is how learning really happens.†When you tour with a set repertoire, how much do you continue that daily rite of discovery?
I’d say there’s a lot of daily discovery. I’ve been working incredibly hard…you always find yourself going back to basics. The piano is very humbling in that sense. You can have ideas, but they have to be translated into the muscles and that process is not necessarily instantaneous. It requires training and patience and self-observation. Some of that discovery is boring athletic discovery – how to get fingers to do things – and the other discovery is what you think the piece is about.
How does that impact the way you present the music in a given concert?
Those ideas change and evolve and you get a different sense of repose and drive you want in various pieces; what they are doing and what they are after and what you are after? What do you want to communicate to the audience? Â Each composer has a different language and questions and problems you have to deal with.
You have an obvious affection for Sebők as witnessed by the essay you wrote for The New Yorker. [Denk has a deal with Random House to do a book based on this essay.]
He was an amazing musician and teacher and I only wish everyone could have heard him talk and play certain things. It altered things in a really amazing way. It was constantly about opening different possibilities. It was very little about dogma. I wanted to write this portrait as a love letter to this whole experience. I felt lucky that I met him and was grateful when The New Yorker thought it was a good idea.Â
A recent review of your performance in Orlando made particular mention of you closing your eyes while playing. I recently saw Richard Goode play Mozart’s 18thPiano concerto and he seemed to be mouthing along with the music. Glenn Gould famously hummed along in his recordings. Why do pianists have these unique ways of playing their instrument?
I’ve struggled with this myself because I have movements in performance that don’t come up in rehearsal. Sometimes in the act of playing the piano you have so much musical feeling you want to give to the phrase, but it all has to be focused to this tiny motion of the finger. There’s this tremendous translation of this whole body’s worth of feeling to these few millimeters and sometimes there’s this reaction and these things you do. I understand they are distracting, but audiences should have some sympathy for the miseries of the pianist trying to corral all this into his work as the pianist. Each instrument has its frustration in that way.
In your essay, An Artist in Residence Eats Breakfast, you say that “I was an atheist until my phone began to understand me; now I have the disturbing sense that God may actually exist, that he has plans for me.†So much of classical music is written in response to or celebration of God, religion, Jesus etc…Do you think as an atheist you approach that material differently than you might if you weren’t?
I’ve thought about this a little bit, partly because my dad was a monk for 10 years before I was born. He had a complicated relationship with religion. By the time I was a teenager he was somewhat disgusted with the church. But there was something about the lore and the mystery of the Bible that he couldn’t resist totally either.
I notice in my apartment I have a couple strange works of art. One is a Russian going to heaven pulled down by demons. The other is a strange reworking of The Last Supper with an albino hamster. For me there is something about the power of the Bible and the role of religion in music that I certainly can’t or wouldn’t want to discount. Of course, music feels like my religion. The kind of ecstasy and time release and the commonality, when many people are brought together in appreciation of a beautiful thing. It’s very hard for me to untangle, but it’s still there though I’m not religious.
When you received the MacArthur Award you said it would give you an opportunity to commission new pieces. Have you done so and if so, by whom?
I did just commission a concerto from Hannah Lash, but none of the money has actually been spent yet. So it’s all just sitting there waiting for its purpose.  Before that I have the book deal and a slate of ongoing Nonesuch Records projects. I haven’t had a chance to embark on the MacArthur yet. So when the book is off my table, knock on wood, I’ll get to that.
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