When it comes to recitals, no one could accuse Jeremy Denk of being more concerned about style than content. There has always been a clear rationale and rigour to his programmes, and more than a whiff of didacticism about them. Denk is artist-in-residence at Milton Court this season. After devoting the first of his appearances there to Mozart’s last five piano sonatas, he followed it up with a guided tour around variation form in an all-day sequence of three recitals, with the help of violinist Karen Gomyo, cellist Julian Steckel and mezzo-soprano Measha Brueggergosman.
Each programme had its own theme. After “variations on death” in the morning, there was “variations on virtuosity” in the afternoon, before a final “variations on heartbreak – and hope”. The repertory covered was certainly diverse. Denk performed 19 works altogether, spanning five centuries – from the early 17th to the present day. He mixed authentic piano pieces with movements from piano trios and violin sonatas, as well as unlikely arrangements of Bach and Monteverdi – there was even a song made famous by Nina Simone but based on an aria from La Traviata. Yet it all added up to rather less than the sum of its multifarious parts.
Some major works were included – the second recital ended with a slightly perfunctory account of Schumann’s Études Symphoniques, the third with Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Op 111 in C minor – but the overall impression was strangely insubstantial. There was also the nagging feeling that had Denk opted to play fewer, larger-scale pieces, the whole event might have cohered more convincingly. That’s whether or not you buy into his ideas on why composers have employed variation form, of which the suggestion that it can be about “romantic loss or farewell” seems to me the most contentious of all. A more compact programme might have attracted a bigger audience, too – the Sunday afternoon turn-out at Milton Court was hugely disappointing for a pianist of Denk’s profile.
But there were highlights, not only Denk’s climactic performance of Op 111, but also Gomyo’s brilliant dispatch of Vieuxtemps’ Souvenirs d’Amérique, an outrageously bravura set of variations on Yankee Doodle and Steckel’s idiomatic and understated account with Denk of Mendelssohn’s Variations Concertantes, Op 17.
There were also new works. If the piano writing in Timo Andres’ Zefiro Torna, based on the tripping chaconne bass of Monteverdi’s madrigal of the same name, seemed overwrought and unconvincing, John Adams’ I Still Play – written earlier this year to mark the retirement of Robert Hurwitz after his 30 years as head of Nonesuch Records – was a charmingly perfect miniature, with echoes of Ravel and Bill Evans as well as nods towards Bach.
Two nights later, in maximum contrast to Denk’s discursive marathon, Alice Sara Ott devoted her recital at St John’s to only two composers, Grieg and Liszt, yet tellingly conveyed a much stronger sense of coherence and meaningful cross-connections than his self-conscious juxtapositions had done. Twelve of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces and his hefty Ballade in G minor made up the first half; Liszt’s Sonata in B minor occupied the second. It’s a programme that Ott has toured extensively and, as she revealed from the platform, this was the last time she was planning to play it.
What Ott described as the “wonderland” of Grieg’s little fantasies was contrasted with the “underworld” of the sonata, and it worked wonderfully well. The selection of lyric pieces contrasted familiar numbers, such as Butterfly and Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, with less well-known ones. It also mixed pieces from early in Grieg’s career, when his music still bore the imprint of Mendelssohn, Chopin and Schumann, with later ones in which his voice was much more personal, distinctive, and at times experimental. Ott’s presentation was energised and brightly lit; she never looked for profundity where there was none to be found, and emphatically placed the musical weight in her Grieg sequence on the Ballade, Op 24, which is a set of variations on a Norwegian folk song.
The fierceness with which the climax of the minor-key variations was presented, turned out to be a foretaste of the Liszt sonata, which was unflinchingly raw and direct, with snarling basslines and razor-edged chords. The performance did indeed conjure up the kind of threatening world Ott had spoken of, but it was presented with such technical brilliance, so crisply and cleanly articulated, that nothing was overbearing or overinsistent, but always dramatic and absorbing. If this really was the last time Ott is going to perform the sonata in public for a while, it was a pretty startling way to say goodbye to it.
