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 style.

Robert Schumann’s Papillons, Op. 2 depicts a love triangle between two brothers and a Polish woman, played out in a masked ball described by John Paul in his novel Flegeljahre. Though an early work, written while Schumann was studying law at Heidelberg University, the music bears the wide expressive range and sudden diversions that would come to mark later character pieces such as Carnaval.

After drawing out the introduction with generous rubato, Denk delved into themes that captured the personas of both brothers: one dreamy and poetic, the other fiery and self-assured. The Polonaise that appears mid work—a theme for the Polish woman—was rendered with grace and commitment.

Papillons is primarily a set of waltzes, and Denk treated each with idiomatic flair. He found the stormy power of the Sixth waltz, the graceful arcs of melody in the Seventh, and the regal pomp of the Tenth. Throughout, Denk performed with crispness and clarity, while bringing attention to the composer’s occasional sweeps of lyricism.

Clara Schumann composed her Three Romances, Op 21 in the summer of 1853 when Robert was suffering from the depression that would lead him to attempt suicide. With their sumptuous harmonies and gentle melodic turns, these works perhaps reflect a yearning for things that were.

Playing with gleaming and resonant tone, Denk brought to the fore every poignant emotion laden within this music. The tender lines of the opening Andante segued into a buoyant middle section—a brief moment of happiness amid the gloom. The joy Denk expressed in the Allegretto was similarly fleeting before the pianist returned to melancholy in the final Agitato, played here with a sense of urgency.

Johannes Brahms circa 1887. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Brahms’s Four Piano Pieces, Op. 119, written in the last years of the composer’s life, also capture nostalgia and emotional tension.

Denk unfolded the opening phrase of the Intermezzo in B minor with a searching intimacy that eventually found footing in a melancholy waltz, rendered with breathy tone. Denk dug in for an agitated reading of the Intermezzo in E minor, the waltz that appears in the middle section offering a warm, though brief, departure. Under Denk’s fingers the Intermezzo in C major took on spry humor. And the concluding Rhapsody sounded with a sense of orchestral grandeur, a bold and declarative statement for a composer who chose to remain a bachelor.

“Frei aber einsam” (free but lonely) was a common phrase for Brahms and those in his circle. That sentiment makes up the material for Missy Mazzoli’s Bolts of Loving Thunder, which complemented Denk’s program.

Written in 2013 for pianist Emanuel Ax, this energetic score packs jarring dissonances, wide Brahmsian arpeggios, and searching passages in a taut, eight-minute length. Haunting the score is the F-A-E motive that reflects Brahms’s resolution about life as a single man.

Denk made the pointillistic gestures and wide leaps that pepper Mazzoli’s work into a stirring musical statement, the crash-and-bang intensity evaporating into silence at its conclusion.

The performance is available until 7 p.m. Wednesday. celebrityseries.org