Jeremy Denk - Jeremy Denk Plays Ives
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Artist: Jeremy DenkConductor: Jeremy Denk
Performer: Jeremy Denk
Composer: Charles Ives
Performer: Tara Helen O'Connor
Edition: Music CD
Format: CD, Classical
Running Time: 74 minutes
Published: 2010
CD Release Date: 2010-10-12
Music Label: Think Denk Media
Product features:
- Charles Ives: Piano Sonata No. 1 and 2 - "Concord"
Music reviews of Jeremy Denk Plays Ives
Music Review: Ives for people who don't like Ives
Rating: 3 Stars
Jeremy Denk has become perhaps our most visible and articulate champion of the music of Charles Ives, which is all to the good. I very much enjoyed his performance, with Soovin Kim, of the composer's four violin sonatas in Philadelphia a few years ago, and so, when I heard he had recorded the two piano sonatas, I was excited. I asked for and received the CD for Christmas, and having listened to it, I have to say it's a disappointment. A big one. I have almost a dozen recordings of the Concord, fewer of the First Sonata, and Denk had not replaced any of them in my affections. He seems to think Ives is an American Liszt (as if we needed one), and he goes in for romantic bombast, banging away in the forte sections while smoothing over the mood shifts and jokes with lots of pedal. The result is aggressive in a way that is often mistaken for Ivesian, but it's also homogenized. The Emerson movement suffers in particular, losing much of its grandeur. The Thoreau movement, by contrast, is overly misty, like a parody of Debussy. (The flute at the end is so distant and washed out that its entrance makes hardly any impression at all.) Ives's famous wit has been suppressed, too, and his homespun elements lack flavor: the hymns aren't very hymnlike, the rags aren't very raggy, and you can't march to the marches. And for the very first time in my life, the First Sonata left me with a headache. This is Ives for people who would rather be listening to something else. (One blogger wrote of this CD, "You don't get many reminders that Ives was a contemporary of Rachmaninoff and Busoni." And this is a good thing?) Give Denk credit, though. He's managed to do something no other performer has ever done: he made me question whether I have been wrong about the value of Ives's music for so many years. Needing reassurance, I went back to Alan Mandel, Nina Deutsch and William Masselos, and gratefully, I found it in them. I don't dislike this recording, exactly - I could never really dislike such a committed performance of Ives, hence the three stars - but I disagree with it, and I disagree also with one of the other reviewers here. Definitive, as Ives himself might say, "it ain't."
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Description of Jeremy Denk Plays Ives
Jeremy Denk's long-awaited CD of the Piano Sonatas of Charles Ives. With accompanying 24-page booklet notes written by Denk "that remind us why the Washington Post's Joan Reinthaler found Denk's "the most interesting and well-written program notes [she had] ever read." Denk's recital programs have long featured not only Ives's famous and monumental "Concord" Sonata but also the far less familiar Sonata No. 1, impressing critics with "thrilling performances" (Anthony Tommasini, New York Times) that offer "an entire world" (Anne Midgette, Washington Post). "Ives wants to recreate the raw experience of music-making, something unfiltered, and beyond all your piano lessons... . While driving me crazy, he reminds me why I play the piano at all." - Jeremy DenkClassical CDs
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