Jeremy Denk explores Romantic-era love triangle in Celebrity Series virtual recital
Robert and Clara Schumann. Source: Wikimedia Commons Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms were no strangers to personal tragedy. Clara had lost her husband Robert to depression, a suicide attempt, and eventually death in an asylum. Brahms, who loved and longed for Clara, stepped in to comfort her. But plans for the couple to marry in 1856 were thwarted for reasons that have been lost to history. Each composer continued to hold a candle for the other and crafted music of both exuberance and melancholy, perhaps reflecting the joys of memory and pain of loss. That was the sense pianist Jeremy Denk conveyed in his Celebrity Series recital, streamed live from WGBH Fraser Studio on Sunday night. Denk remains a thinker’s pianist, and the program explored the Schumann-Brahms love triangle through early and late works by the three composers. Missy Mazzoli’s Bolts of Loving Thunder, also heard Sunday night, refashioned Brahmsian gestures in a bold, twenty-first-century styl...