Pianist Jeremy Denk commands a broad and challenging solo and chamber music repertoire. He has played Mozart with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony; Rachmaninoff with the Chicago Symphony; Brahms with the Philharmonia in London’s Royal Festival Hall; Tobias Picker with the Moscow Philharmonic; and Schumann with the Juilliard Orchestra and Kurt Masur – a concert broadcast nationally on “Performance Today.” But his repertoire ranges from these standard works to Messiaen, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Kirchner, and Ives, and he maintains working relationships with a number of living composers. A New York Times critic wrote of his 2001 performance of Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto: “Hearing Mr. Denk’s bracing, effortlessly virtuosic and utterly joyous performance, one would never guess how phenomenally difficult the piano part is.”
A double-degree graduate of Oberlin College and Conservatory in chemistry and piano, Denk also earned a Master’s degree from Juilliard. Last season he programmed Ives’s “Concord” Sonata with the final sonata of Beethoven and a medley of Bach chorales and chorale-preludes, American Rags, and Stephen Foster ballads. Next season he will give two all-Beethoven recitals in Philadelphia; play at Mozart festivals in Boston and Philadelphia; give two performances of all the Bach keyboard partitas, and play much of Schubert’s chamber music in a festival dedicated to the composer at London’s Wigmore Hall.
Mr. Denk, an avid chamber music practitioner, has collaborated with the Borromeo, Brentano, Mirò, St. Lawrence, Shanghai and Vermeer Quartets, and has appeared at all the major chamber music festivals. He first performed with violinist Joshua Bell at Spoleto in 2004, and they have since played several recital tours together. A Philadelphia reviewer noted their “equal partnership, with no upstaging.”
Mr. Denk’s popular blog – “Think Denk” (jeremydenk.blogspot.com) – was cited by the music critic of the New Yorker, who wrote “Who needs music critics when you have performers who can write like that?” Jeremy Denk lives in New York City. |
