New York Classical Review

It was ladies on one side, gentlemen on the other at Jeremy Denk’s recital in The Town Hall Sunday afternoon.

No, the pianist didn’t rearrange the spectator seating. He played music composed by women in the program’s first half, and music by men after intermission.

The personable musician, as known for his way with words as with notes, spoke to the audience at this recital presented by Peoples’ Symphony Concerts, the nonprofit presently celebrating 125 years of putting on concerts the average working person can afford. Denk took note that this is Women’s History Month, and asked that the audience withhold applause till the end of his “suite” of ten short pieces by seven composers. “I wanted the women to have their say without men interrupting,” he said, getting an appreciative laugh.

The deliciously varied suite, interlarded with Etudes by the redoubtable Hélène de Montgeroult, closed with a wistful Andante by Clara Schumann. When he got around to the male composers, Denk noted that the works on his program—Four Pieces, Op. 119 by Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann’s Fantasie in C major, Op. 17—were “two of the greatest love letters in music, and both written to the same woman,” the aforementioned Clara.

This is the kind of savvy programming that could win a person a MacArthur Fellowship, which is exactly what happened to Jeremy Denk in 2013. On Sunday the question was, Can he put his music where his mouth is?

The answer was an emphatic yes.

The discovery of the day was Montgeroult (1764-1836), the French marquise and pianist who (the story goes) saved her aristocratic neck in the Revolution by beguiling the tribunal with improvised variations on the “Marseillaise,” and whose startlingly original compositions are just now beginning to come back into vogue.

Composing in a style described by a biographer as “the missing link between Mozart and Chopin,” Montgeroult published her magnum opus, Complete Method for Teaching the Fortepiano Including 114 Etudes, in 1820.

Denk led off with one of those etudes, which put one in mind of Schubert, with the right hand rippling and the left hand crossing repeatedly over it, playing both eloquent bass and bright treble. Robert Schumann was the composer anticipated in another Montgeroult etude with a skipping tune over restless harmonies. Rapid-fire dialogue and more hand-crossing characterized the remaining two etudes, melodious and graceful in Denk’s hands despite their technical challenges.

Alternating with these etudes was a cream-center assortment of musical bites by other women, vividly characterized by Denk whether tangy, sweet or hot. Missy Mazzoli’s Heartbreaker, composed for a piano competition, showcased Denk’s ability to play fast repeated notes and dizzying leaps with wild abandon. Amy Beach’s “In Autumn” and “Dreaming” (from Four Sketches, Op. 15) hopped gaily and surged romantically, respectively.

Cécile Chaminade’s La Lisonjera (The Flatterer), Op. 50 strolled like a boulevardier, charming with elegant voicing and rubato. In contrast, Paris, a 1972 piece by Meredith Monk, alternated sighing phrases with sudden bursts of agitation over a gloomy left-hand ostinato.

Ruth Crawford Seeger seemed to be channeling Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata finale in her Piano Study in Mixed Accents, a bracingly syncopated atonal presto with the two hands playing a single line an octave apart. The Andante from Clara Schumann’s Three Romances, Op. 11, closed the set in a melancholy mood, but with a surge of passion in the middle.

Brahms seemed to echo Clara’s mood in the B minor Intermezzo that began his Op. 119, but (in Denk’s hushed performance) with deeply repressed anguish and ambiguous harmonies that didn’t reveal the tonic key until the piece’s final cadence. Agitation became overt in the jittery E minor Intermezzo, worrying and varying a theme over and over, yet transforming it into the tenderest of waltzes in the middle.

Brahms marked the C major Intermezzo “graceful and playful”; it was all that and also light as air under Denk’s fingertips–the better to appreciate the muscularity of the Rhapsody in E-flat major, with its stomping, Hungarian-style five-bar phrases. Dramatic interludes, brooding or twinkling, wove through it. And how like Brahms to conclude a musical love letter with a fiery minor-key coda.

Robert Schumann was ablaze too in the opening of his C major Fantasie, but with ardent love and longing. But as volatile as were the moods of the first movement, this piece, begun as a tribute to Beethoven as well as Clara, was noticeably in sonata form—and, as Denk astutely pointed out, made up almost entirely of variations on a theme from Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved). That’s a lot of musical and extramusical meaning to pack into one movement, but Denk seemed to take note of it all in the playing, while going with the flow of Schumann’s imagination.

Denk put plenty of snap into the march movement’s dotted rhythm, an obsessive Schumann feature that the pianist indulged completely. He also reveled in piano sonorities from booming bass to ringing middle to singing top, and barreled into the coda’s impossible leaps at top speed. This was Schumann-the-lover unbound.

Of course the audience applauded madly after this tour de force. Denk patiently waited them out, then performed another kind of tour de force—inhabiting the restless heart and mind of a lover in limbo, far from his beloved, dreaming of happiness remembered, in the achingly slow final movement that elevates this work above all Schumann’s others.

What encore could follow such a profound experience? Denk’s answer: something completely different—Donald Lambert’s dazzling, hilarious stride-piano take on the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Tannhäuser.  Denk couldn’t resist playing it, he said, because “Clara detested Wagner.”

Peoples’ Symphony Concerts presents pianist Aaron Diehl performing works from the classical and jazz repertoire, 7:30 p.m. Saturday at High School of Fashion Industries, 225 W. 24th St. pscny.org