Tickled Ivories He’s a pianist, a writer, and a genius too. Welcome to the laughable life of Jeremy Denk. BY DONA LD ROSENBERG | PHOTO BY PETER H A PA K
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“genius” grant, as the awards have come to be known. Just two months later, he was named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year. By March, he added a prestigious Avery Fisher Prize—in the same week that the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra announced his appointment as artistic partner. Amid all of these honors, Denk was preparing to serve as artistic director of the 2014 Ojai Music Festival—for which he’s concocted the libretto of a one-act comic opera—and writing his memoirs (“an extremely digressive one”) for Random House. It is scheduled for publication in 2015. The man behind this remarkable string of achievements is a genial, chatty, and irreverent Manhattanite who can’t quite believe what’s happening.
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he world according to jeremy denk is a whirlwind place. As an underaged undergrad in the late 1980s, he was a doubledegree student with majors in piano performance and chemistry, and he wowed professors on both sides of campus. Since then, he has earned plaudits as a keyboard virtuoso in two senses of the words: Along with his gifts as an interpreter of piano repertoire from the Baroque to today, Denk’s ability to articulate the joys and challenges of making music has won him a legion of admirers. Just how respected is he? Take a big breath. Last fall, mere days before the release of his probing CD of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Denk was named a MacArthur Fellow, which garnered him a $625,000