Review: Pianist Jeremy Denk performs versatile, spirited program in Schubert Club season opener

No classical pianist juggles the demands placed upon a musical artist of the 21st century more skillfully than Jeremy Denk. Not only is he a brilliant interpreter of piano works composed between the 1780s and the present, but he’s a very entertaining performer to watch, full of flair and flamboyance.

He also has a way with words. Few give a better curtain speech than Denk, and he’s also among the most captivating of writers about music and the life of a working musician.

This complete package is on display at St. Paul’s Ordway Concert Hall this week, as Denk is opening the Schubert Club’s International Artist Series with a pair of solo recitals. The first took place Sunday afternoon. Always one intent upon expanding an audience’s horizons, he’s spending half of each program on works by female composers, ranging in vintage from 1846 to 2019.

One of those women is Clara Schumann, who acts as both creator and muse in that a movement from one of her Romances opens the concert, while the second half is given over to music written for her by her future husband, Robert Schumann, and a mentee of that composer who eventually proposed to her, Johannes Brahms.

A former St. Paul Chamber Orchestra artistic partner, Denk has proven on past visits a fascinating musical mind with his fingers firmly on the emotional pulse of whatever work he’s playing. On Sunday, he eloquently channeled the romantic spirit of Brahms and Robert Schumann. But he felt much more like a man on a mission during the concert’s first half.

That’s when he performed that collage of women’s work, a stylistically varied suite that threw lush and lovely romanticism into often jarring juxtaposition with contemporary composers’ reflections upon chaos and conflict. It was a high-contrast set, and a tremendously memorable one, each stylistic segue a breathtaking bend in the road.

What a storm the pianist summoned up on Tania León’s “Rituál,” delivered with such fury as to seemingly threaten the Steinway’s strings. But then the clouds would part on such delightful dances as Cécile Chaminade’s “The Flatterer” and Louise Farrenc’s A-flat “Mélodie,” or give way to the playfulness of Amy Beach’s “In Autumn.”

Perhaps no sequence better captured the pianist’s versatility than the final three works of the concert’s first half: Ruth Crawford Seeger’s “Piano Study in Mixed Accents” was an unmitigated eruption, while the concert’s newest piece, Phyllis Chen’s “Sumitones,” proved an absorbing reflection that gave way to Beach’s florid and ethereal “Dreaming.”

Both Brahms’ “Four Piano Pieces” and Robert Schumann’s Op. 17 Fantasie displayed tenderness and toughness, as well, qualities for which their dedicatee, Clara Schumann, was known. In addition to suffusing them with passion, Denk used evocative body language to underline the music’s mood shifts, whether suddenly sitting up ramrod straight or crouching to coax notes from the instrument.

Having given so much intense devotion to these 11 composers’ works, it’s no surprise that Denk decided to indulge his lighter side on encores that channeled Richard Wagner via Fats Waller and got loose and lively with Scott Joplin. As if the concert hadn’t already proven him versatile enough.

What: Works by Clara Schumann, Tania León, Cécile Chaminade, Missy Mazzoli, Amy Beach, Meredith Monk, Louise Farrenc, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Phyllis Chen, Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tue.

Where: Ordway Concert Hall, 345 Washington St., St. Paul

Tickets: $36-$75 (students and children free), available at 651-292-3268 or schubert.org.

Classical music writer Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.