Jeremy Denk muses on life, love and art with Prabir, leader of Prabir and the Substitutes, his artist liaison for a date with the Richmond Symphony:
http://jeremydenk.net/blog/2007/10/29/liaison/
Note that it was raining during Denk's visit. Jack Kerouac also rolled through town in the rain in "On the Road," but Prabir wasn’t driving. Worse luck for Kerouac.
News of a strike disrupting the schedule of the Paris Opera . . .
http://www.playbillarts.com/news/article/7281.html
. . . brings to mind my favorite opera movie, István Szabó’s "Meeting Venus," the hilarious yet bittersweet tale of a Parisian troupe (where "you can be misunderstood in six different languages") coping with a black-leather Eurotrash staging of Wagner's "Tannhäuser" that's almost undone by labor strife. Among its endearing absurdities is the casting of Glenn Close as the production's diva.
It's available on DVD (via Amazon.com) – a pricey German import, but well worth the bucks.
with pianist Jeremy Denk
Oct. 26, University of Richmond
Since the Richmond Symphony moved into temporary venues pending renovation of the Carpenter Center, the orchestra has not presented a piano concerto in a mainstage concert. (Most of the church sanctuaries in which it now plays can accommodate a concert grand or an orchestra, but not both.) So, its 50th anniversary gala featuring Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 would have been a treat regardless of the soloist.
Fortunately, the soloist was Jeremy Denk, who is not just a first-rate pianist but an artist who values music-making over mere performance.
Technical mastery and an ear for the grand gesture may suffice (if not satisfy) in the "Emperor" Concerto, but the Fourth needs more. This is music that thinks aloud, ponders the implications of its material, tests extremes of dynamism and expression. Its nearest relations in the Beethoven canon are not the other concertos, but the sonatas that are too subtle and rife with ambiguity to be saddled with nicknames.
Denk is the ideal interpreter of music that defies glib characterization or facile execution. He has the chops to conceive an ideal reading of a score and make it happen, but he doesn’t settle for that. He probes a composition, leading an exploration in which the listener is not just a witness but a participant. Is that what the composer meant? he wonders, and so do you. And so what if the answer is no? Posing the question enriches the experience in a way that a predictably "correct" rendition never could.
His performance was not one for the ages, but of the moment. It was nervy and impetuous, imperfect in its rendering of this arpeggio or that accompanying passage; perhaps it sprinted when it should have jogged, or lingered when it might better have moved on. But it was palpably, insistently alive – and for that reason, compelling from first note to last.
Conductor Mark Russell Smith and the orchestra were alert, engaged partners in Denk’s odyssey, contributing full-blooded sonority, crisp articulation, whiplash accents and consistently singing tone. It’s hard to imagine a more telling realization of the contrast of tentative piano and emphatic orchestra that propels the concerto’s slow movement.
The program was a re-creation of the one devised by the symphony’s founding music director, the late Edgar Schenkman, for the orchestra’s 1957 debut. Schenkman’s selection of the Beethoven Fourth instead of a more crowd-pleasing concerto, and of the deeply musical but unglamorous Mieczyslaw Horszowski to play it, speaks eloquently to the grounding this orchestra received from the start.
Schenkman’s program (heard in this re-creation by three of his children) also featured Mendelssohn’s "Scottish" Symphony (No. 3), one of the great meldings of tune-spinning, orchestration and symphonic form, plus an appetizer in the early baroque Toccata of Girolamo Frescobaldi as arranged by Hans Kindler (austere compared with the Bach extravaganzas produced by Leopold Stokowski around the same time) and a dessert in Glinka’s giddily exuberant "Russlan and Ludmilla" Overture.
During the first half of the concert, the orchestra sounded to be adjusting on the fly to Camp Concert Hall in the University of Richmond’s Modlin Arts Center; the room's bright, almost clinically detailed acoustic favors strings and challenges winds to maintain balance. The musicians were better attuned to the space in the Beethoven and Glinka.
The evening opened with a parade of public officials lauding the symphony’s anniversary. Virginia Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling credited his son’s academic success to the discipline of musical instruction as a trombonist in the Hanover High School Band and Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra – a connection that few public-policy makers understand, let alone acknowledge.
The most moving extramusical moment came in the recognition of – and ovation for – violinist Elizabeth Moore, the last charter member still performing in the orchestra.
Most musicians and listeners would consider the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams a name from the distant past. His most frequently performed works, "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis" and "The Lark Ascending," date from 1910 and 1920, respectively. Yet his widow, biographer and sometime librettist, Ursula Vaughan Williams, died just this past Tuesday (Oct. 23).
Her obituary from The Globe and Mail of Toronto:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071026.OBVAUGHAN26/TPStory/Obituaries
Granted, she was 40 years younger than her husband (they married in 1953 after their first spouses died), and she lived to the age of 87.
But it's not unusual to encounter intimates and acquaintances of long-dead figures and witnesses to long-ago events. In 1990 I interviewed a lady who accompanied Hugo von Hofmannstahl, the librettist of Richard Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier," to a performance of the opera at the first Salzburg Festival in 1925. I've known people who were close to such historically distant artists as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, George Gershwin, Bohuslav Martinu, Bruno Walter and Albert Schweitzer. I learned "The Wreck of the Old 97" from my grandfather, who witnessed the train wreck in 1903 and knew the man who wrote the lyrics. And I'm still several years shy of 60.
"Old" is an elastic term, and as life spans grow longer it will stretch even further.
Julia Fischer, the 24-year-old German violinist who joins Yuri Temikarnov 
and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in tour appearances Oct. 23 at the Kennedy Center in Washington and Oct. 25 at the Ferguson Center in Newport News, has been named the 2007 Gramophone Artist of the Year, winning a poll of the British magazine's readers and the listeners of 14 classical radio stations worldwide.
In both the Washington and Newport News dates, Fischer will be the soloist in the Beethoven Violin Concerto. (See October 2007 calendar for details.)
Cellist James Wilson and four other musicians will present "Baroque by Candlelight," a program previewing the 2008 Richmond Festival of Music, at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 14 
at Wilton House Museum, 215 S. Wilton Road.
Wilson, artistic director of the festival, will be joined by New York-based baroque violinists Claire Jolivet and Theresa Salomon, Richmond Symphony flutist Mary Boodell and harpsichordist Carsten Schmidt in chamber music that might have been heard in the homes of early Americans. The program includes works by Handel, J.S. and C.P.E. Bach, Corelli, John Antes and Raynor Taylor.
Admission, $25 for adults, $15 for students, covers the concert and a tour of Wilton, an 18th-century mansion overlooking the James River in Richmond’s West End.
The ensemble will play the same program in a fund-raiser for the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia, the festival’s presenting organization, at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 13 at Wilton. Tickets for that event are $50.
The 2008 festival will run from April 8 to May 3, with five concerts at Second Presbyterian Church, Bon Air Presbyterian Church and the Virginia Holocaust Museum, as well as a chamber-music workshop for adults and secondary-school students.
The series, "Two Centuries of Music from America," will feature 14 musicians and groups in works by 29 composers at work in this country from the late-18th century through the present.
Series tickets are $110 for adults, $85 for seniors and $35 for students. Single tickets are $25 for adults, $20 for seniors and $10 for students.
Tickets for both the preview concerts and the festival will go on sale Nov. 1.
For more information, call (804) 519-2098 or visit:
www.richmondfestivalofmusic.org
Fittingly for an artist almost as well-known for writing as for music-making, Jeremy Denk was multi-tasking when we connected. While he was being interviewed by phone 
in Miami Beach, the concert pianist and author of the music blog "Think Denk" was scanning a restaurant menu and ordering a salad, fueling up for a performance of Beethoven’s "Emperor" Concerto with Ars Flores, a South Florida orchestra of professionals and advanced students.
"This was supposed to be my semi-secret chance for get Beethoven 5 back under my fingers," Denk said. "But now it turns out MTT is coming to the concert." MTT is Michael Tilson Thomas, who conducts Florida’s New World Symphony as well as the San Francisco Symphony, with whom the pianist performed earlier this month in Beethoven’s First Concerto.
"This is turning into a big Beethoven month for me," but not by some long-made plan. Denk was engaged as a substitute for an indisposed Itzhak Perlman in San Francisco, and was booked in place of Stephen Prutsman to play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in the Richmond Symphony’s 50th anniversary gala.
The concert, Oct. 26 at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center, is a re-creation of the symphony’s 1957 debut program. Denk fills the role then played by Mieczyslaw Horszowski. ("I had no idea I was portraying Horszowski," he e-mailed. "I think I need to go practice!")
Like any capable artist following a familiar script, "I’m always looking for ways to make it fresh," Denk said. "But that’s not something I have to worry about too much. . . . Being free and improvisatory, alert to what’s happening in the next moment, is part of my personality."
He believes he naturally resists routine: "I’m not usually enmeshed in the way a piece is usually done."
This is a running theme in Denk’s blogging. One of his earliest posts, from March 2005, reads in part: "[H]ow IDIOTIC the ‘old ways’ of playing something seem (and by old I mean six months ago): how incredibly self-critical you become. And the idiocy is usually inattention . . . and so I force myself, bit by bit, to pay attention. This is painstaking work, measure by measure, repetitive (sometimes to no apparent result) – trying to truly ‘pay attention.’ It is weird to repeat paying attention; repetition tends to give way to tedium, and inattention. Practicing is straining towards the opposite of this natural tendency. But then, invariably, you run across another problem: mental attention translates inaccurately into muscular tension (this movement from intangible to tangible runs through piano playing, in every direction: printed score to evanescent sound, for example). Your perception of attention is misplaced; you confuse a hunched muscle for a sparking neuron."
Denk has not (so far) written professionally. He flirted with adding English to music and chemistry majors while he was a student at Oberlin College and its conservatory. His best tutelage in the written word, he recalls, came from the longtime Oberlin English professor David Walker, who was "very exacting about language and thought."
The pianist began blogging literally in mid-conversation. "One day a friend was on the phone with me, and said, ‘Why not write a blog?’ And as we continued to talk, I got online and set it up." (The current "Think Denk" is second-generation, integrated into a site with biography, schedule, audio samples, reviews, etc.)
Writing about music, he said, "I often make certain things about the music clear to myself . . . [make] connections I may not have made" while studying the score or rehearsing. Blogging does not supplant, or even supplement, normal practice, but is a channel for "free association" between the music he is addressing and the world he inhabits.
"There’s an unconscious quality" to many of his posts, thinks Denk.
More of his thoughts can be found at:
http://jeremydenk.net/blog/
The Richmond Symphony's 50th anniversary re-creation of its 1957 debut concert begins at 8 p.m. Oct. 26 in Camp Concert Hall, Modlin Arts Center, University of Richmond. Tickets: $50-$65. Details: (804) 788-1212, www.richmondsymphony.com
