CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Jeremy Denk

Zankel Hall
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Jeremy Denk, Piano

IVES Piano Sonata No. 2, "Concord, Mass., 1840–60"

BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, "Hammerklavier"

Encore:
IVES The Alcotts from Piano Sonata No. 2, "Concord, Mass., 1840–60"

Program Notes:

CHARLES IVES (1874–1954)
Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840–60”
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1826)
Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”

Written roughly 100 years apart, the “Concord” and “Hammerklavier” Sonatas stand defiantly on either side of the Romantic era: two craggy, sprawling pianistic statements, testing the limits of the instrument and of musical thought. Both pieces are summations, demonstrations of what music is supposed to be (or might hypothetically be): Each is culmination of a life’s work. One might argue that they are the first and last epic-Romantic sonatas (one emerging from the Classic, the other from Modernism), and that they reflect another poignant historical bracket: the rise and decline of the modern piano itself. Both seek modernity, paradoxically, in the past.

In their grand ambitions, seeking the unattainable, both sonatas verge on the insane. The final movement of the “Hammerklavier” boasts one of the most bizarre fugue subjects ever composed; this is not even to mention its shocking, unbarred introduction, by turns Baroque and proto-Romantic. The Scherzo of the Ives (“Hawthorne”) could be diagnosed with serious schizophrenia, roaming from marching band to hymn, to ragtime to ghostly halting murmurs in empty churchyards.

But while these pieces share a certain mania, and certain similarities of proportion (three long movements, one fragment), they describe very different narratives. The Beethoven, if anything, gets wilder as it proceeds; it seems, in its final movement, to celebrate the power of the mind, the audacity of human achievement, the composer as super-hero. The Ives, on the other hand, after two enormously involved opening movements, simplifies, giving way from daring to beauty and repose. The very moving finale, “Thoreau,” describes a retreat from action and desire into the embracing rhythm of Nature, from counterpoint into the world of sounds. Beethoven concludes by reaching, even over-reaching; Ives, on the other hand, relinquishes.

The “Hammerklavier”’s opening movement is its most conventional, which is not saying much. Its opening is bracing, astounding: It leaps into existence with a tremendous, fortissimo fanfare, and then abruptly stops. The movement is characterized by tremendous rhythmic drive, and shifts between expectancy and explosion. The development is mostly a thrilling fugue on the opening fanfare, cycling through harmonies relentlessly, searching only to find the most distant imaginable key (B major). There is only one sustained, lyrical theme, and it oddly melts from major into minor and back. This interweaving of major and minor is a crucial recurring element, the movement’s calling-card; the major/minor waver pairs with rhythmic drive to create a sense of deep, exuberant instability.

The ensuing Scherzo is only two minutes or so long. It is built on a repetitive “nonsense” phrase (an ascending and descending third), which often finds its way into “the wrong key,” stumbling into questioning silences. There are numerous interruptions and wrong turns. Towards the end of this movement the “wrong note” (B, as opposed to B-flat, the key of the piece) builds itself into a tremendous rage—but then the “problem” is solved, with a few fluttering, laughing bars. Is the joke on us?

After this brief intense joke comes an immense, intense lament. The slow movement’s first two notes were a late addition; but they are a masterstroke, making the opening of the slow movement identical to the obsessive motive of the preceding Scherzo. These same, silly notes are now utterly transformed, into a mournful chorale! (The attempt to bring together the most profane and profound materials looks forward to the “Concord” Sonata.)

This chorale circles around certain harmonies and contours of melody, mostly close to home, but eventually it dies out, stopping as if in mid-breath. Out of this silence emerges an almost Italianate texture, suggestive of Bellini, or a Chopin nocturne. The left hand lays down a detached accompaniment (exactly like strings in Italian opera), while the right hand gives voice to extravagant filigree passages, marked “con gran espressione:” a very unusual and special marking for Beethoven. What is Beethoven after with this fusion of genre, this confrontation of chorale and operatic aria? These strangely contrasting ideas and the intense pathos they have explored are somehow addressed by a third, calmer theme (in D major)—really just a descending arpeggio—tossed between the treble and the very low bass. And these three odd bedfellows constitute only the exposition! A short but wildly modulating development leads us back to a reprise of the whole process (though the chorale is now concealed behind a stream of flowing 32nd notes). At last, the movement allows itself to end in the major key, with the implication of redemption.

One of the most famous passages in the piano repertoire follows: Beethoven’s free, wild transition into the final fugue. There are halting, strangely syncopated passages of chords, out of which ideas coalesce; we find ourselves in some Baroque world, for a moment, and then are lost again, looking elsewhere. Beethoven is evoking the “creation” of his fugue from fragments, the emergence of his final movement from chaos, and from music history itself.

It is hard to overstate the humor and wildness of this fugue; it’s as if he is grappling with the very idea of a fugue, or laughing at it. Beethoven marks “fugue with some license,” a hilarious understatement, as this fugue strays unimaginably far over the line, piling on craggy dissonances, fragmentations, and wild rhythmic events. For just one example, Beethoven attempts to do his theme backwards. Now, the theme has a series of running sixteenth note pickups to a landing-note on the downbeat; when Beethoven puts it in reverse, suddenly these pickup notes run up to nowhere, leaving us with a strange “hiccup” in the middle of the measure. It sounds like a mistake; you might imagine Beethoven would relent; but no, he sees delight and opportunity in his hiccup; he inserts the normal, forwards version of the theme in the gap, and pretty soon there are running scales, backwards and forwards, up and down, all over the measure, dizzying and endless. Beethoven builds enormous, elated sequences on this resulting idea; he surmounts the absurdity of his own compositional premise, and revels in it.

Towards the end, an impasse is reached; a beautiful, simple imitative passage in D major emerges, an island of calm, deeply touching after all the chaos. But it is brief; then we are back to the main key and Beethoven attempts to bring this sprawling fugue to a conclusion. A unison summary, ascending chromatically, leaves us in B-flat major, our home key; but the final chord is not on the downbeat; there is a sense that the instability lingers, that the crazy energy of the work is not resolved, that it could never be resolved.

The “Concord” Sonata’s four movements are each of totally different natures, reflecting Ives’s vision of the four figures of the Transcendentalist movement. “Emerson” is the most difficult movement to deal with, as it attempts to capture the digressive, heaven-storming, free-thinking spirit of Emerson himself. In Ives’s words:

As thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them along the ground first.

And thus all the ideas are presented at the outset, in a sea of dissonant improvisation, and then over the course of the movement Ives attempts to untangle the mess, to deal with each idea on its own, as well as new ones that come up. One gets the sense of a vast, improvised gospel/essay, including materials from hymn, revival, Beethoven, Wagner, fugue, recitative—you name it. Finally, descending chromatic lines take over in the bass; there is a general dissolve and deconstruction; we hear the “Emerson” theme and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, dying out, gradually letting go.

“Hawthorne” is essentially and fundamentally a joke. It is a fusion of several “supernatural” episodes from Hawthorne’s short stories, including particularly that of the Celestial Railroad. In this story, passengers book a cheap ticket to Heaven on a train, where much celebrating and drinking is going on; the passengers laugh at the slow-moving pilgrims outside the window, singing their hymns; but of course, their cheap ticket does not exactly take them to Heaven. This is the “theme” of the movement perhaps, this dialectic, the constant interplay of the profane and sacred. Famously, a board is used to depress very soft clusters of notes, high in the keyboard, like “distant bells over the graveyard.” The opening of the movement is the fanciful frost, growing on a window in winter; some moments later, demons dance around the bowl of a pipe; scarecrows look down at gypsy bands; at a much later juncture, a marching band is stopped short by a drum corps. When “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” arrives, experienced Ivesians will know they are in for it; all hell will break loose. And indeed the ending is a chaotic pile-up, faster and faster, in which the themes swirl; one last quiet hymn is followed by a naughty, dissonant “so there” conclusion, similar to the conclusion of the “Hammerklavier” Scherzo.

“The Alcotts” is an evocation of the “commonplace beauty” of the Orchard House in Concord, where the Alcotts lived. Beth is playing at the spinet; she plays Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of course, but she does not discriminate. She plays hymns, too, and is later playing Scotch airs and Mendelssohn’s wedding march. The movement overtly and obviously fuses classical themes with popular ones. This fusion results in a triumphant arrival, towards the end and in C major, of the “transcendental theme of Concord”—the recurring Ur-Theme of the whole piece, though perhaps we hadn’t known it until now. The emergence of this theme is a moment of clarity, of understanding, which dispels the chaos of all that preceded it.

“Thoreau,” of all the movements, is the one with a program, a sequential narrative. It is basically a day on Walden Pond. Thoreau awakens in nature, in haze and mist, and listens at length to its sounds. But eventually he gets the desire to act. He gets going after something, several times, more and more eagerly, and reaches a C-major climax of action.

But just at that moment the rhythm of Nature intervenes: He knows now that he must let Nature flow through him, and slowly. A repeated, haunting 3-note idea in the left hand (A-C-G) represents this rhythm of nature. Over it appears a haunting new theme in the right hand, a mournful reworking of Stephen Foster’s Down in the Cornfield.

But Thoreau’s impulse to act has not entirely died down; he has relapses of desire: “At times the … former more active speculations come over him, as if he would trace a certain intensity even in his submission.”

So a second series of crescendos and departures occurs, taking us to wild climaxes, but then—just as suddenly as the first time—the rhythm of Nature intervenes, and this time it’s for good.

Evening comes on, the music gets darker, more brooding, and for the conclusion of this dialectical day, Ives reserves the final crowning, unifying, Romantic gesture. The “Transcendental Theme” of Concord appears once more, as if played by Thoreau’s flute over Walden Pond: It is seen through the mists of other motives, now floating in the evening air. This “Transcendental Theme” is then merged with the rhythm of Nature, a potent symbol of over-soul. It calls back to all the other movements, says farewell, and then vanishes, leaving us listening to strains of Down in the Cornfield. Ives’s ending is masterful, deeply touching: We hear a last hazy remembrance of the morning, a vague, luminous suggestion of Beethoven’s Fifth, and the piece is over, passing into night.


Composed between 1916 and 1919, the “Concord” Sonata received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on March 30, 1965, with Easley Blackwood, piano.

Composed between 1817 and 1818, the “Hammerklavier” Sonata received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Recital Hall (now Zankel Hall) on April 17, 1891, with Arthur Friedheim, piano.

—Jeremy Denk

© 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Jeremy Denk, Piano
American pianist Jeremy Denk has steadily built a name as one of today’s most compelling young artists.

Mr. Denk has appeared as a soloist with several major orchestras, including The Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, London Philharmonia, Dallas Symphony, and the Houston Symphony. This season he appeared for the third time with the San Francisco Symphony, replacing an ailing Itzhak Perlman and performing Beethoven’s First Concerto.

Mr. Denk appears often in recital in New York, Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, and was an artist-in-residence at the 2008 Gilmore Keyboard Festival. Tonight’s concert marks Mr. Denk’s solo recital debut presented by Carnegie Hall, and culminates a tour pairing Ives’s “Concord” Sonata and Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier.” He will give four additional performances in New York and in Boston this season, and appears in recital and with orchestras in cities from Florida to Colorado, and from Houston to Buffalo.

A pianist with an unusually broad repertoire, Mr. Denk maintains working relationships with a number of living composers. He has participated in such premieres as Jake Heggie’s concerto Cut Time; Libby Larsen’s Collage: Boogie; Kevin Puts’s Alternating Current, and Ned Rorem’s The Unquestioned Answer. In 2002 he recorded Tobias Picker’s Second Piano Concerto with the Moscow Philharmonic. He has also worked closely with composer Leon Kirchner on many of his recent compositions, recording his Sonata No. 2 (2001). This season he performs works by György Ligeti, Elliott Carter, Morton Feldman, Thomas Adès, and Ives.

An avid chamber musician as well, Mr. Denk has collaborated with many of the world’s finest string quartets, and appeared at such festivals as Spoleto (US and Italy), Verbier, and the Santa Fe and Seattle Chamber Music. He has also spent several summers at the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont, and participated in “Musicians from Marlboro” national tours. At Spoleto in 2004, Mr. Denk met and first performed with violinist Joshua Bell, whose subsequent invitation to do a recital tour sparked a continuing musical partnership that has resulted in a recording of Corigliano’s Violin Sonata on the Sony Classical label.

Mr. Denk maintains a widely-read blog entitled Think Denk. It has been praised by colleagues and the music press alike, and records some of his touring, practicing, and otherwise unrelated experiences, as well as delving into fairly detailed musical analyses and essays.

After graduating from Oberlin College and Conservatory, where he studied the piano and chemistry, Mr. Denk earned a master’s degree in music from Indiana University as a pupil of György Sebök, and a doctorate in piano performance from The Juilliard School, where he worked with Herbert Stessin. He lives in New York City. Mr. Denk’s website and blog address is jeremydenk.net.