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REVIEW: Women Composers Get Their Due in Jeremy Denk’s Inspired Conrad Recital

Paul Bodine
Times of San Diego

January 11, 2025

 

Are women composers finally getting their due? This weekend alone in San Diego, thirteen works by eleven female composers were featured in three different classical events. True, all the soloists were men and each concert’s anchoring pieces were canonical “bro” compositions. But the trend inspires optimism.

By far the bulk of this weekend’s feminine programming was pianist Jeremy Denk’s ambitious Friday recital at The Conrad for La Jolla Music Society. Giving women their propers was very much the point of his lovingly crafted program. Denk, a master of innovative programming, devoted the recital’s entire first half to nine composing heroines from Beethoven’s time to now — a 35-minute grand tour of the rich variety of women’s composition.

Denk grouped ten works into contrasting pairs: a short work by a historical composer coupled with a brief piece (none longer than 7 minutes) by a contemporary. This temporal contrast entailed a stylistic contrast: accessibly melodic nineteenth-century pieces were set in relief by more rhythmically or harmonically challenging recent works.

Cecile Chaminade’s charmingly evocative La Lisonjera (The Flatterer) from 1890 was nicely offset by Missy Mazzoli’s brilliantly moody Heartbreaker from 2013. The floating dissonances of Phyllis Chen’s SumiTones (2019) were leavened by Amy Beach’s lovely Dreaming from 1892. Call it palette-cleansing cum inspired curation.

One unintended consequence of Denk’s scheme: the contemporary works tended to expose the “‘salon”-music quality of the nineteenth-century composers (Clara Schumann very much excepted). Meredith Monk’s hypnotic, masterly Paris from 1972, for example, put Beach’s lightweight In Autumn (1892) firmly in its place. Crawford Seeger’s formidable Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930) made Farrenc’s graceful Melodie in A-flat Major feel unambitious.

This wasn’t about differences in competence or skill. Pre-feminist composers had to stay in their lanes or be ghosted by a culture that limited the instrumentation, performance settings, and duration of their compositions (and even prevented them from formally studying composition and counterpoint).

Hovering over the evening was Clara Schumann, arguably the grand matriarch of women composers. Denk opened the concert with a completely convincing interpretation of her melancholic Romance in A Minor (1853), the work of a master, and closed it with “love letters” to her by the two giants in her orbit: Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann.

Denk perfectly captured the autumnal warmth and nostalgia of Brahms’ four opus 119 works — his last for solo piano. When Schumann wrote his Fantasy in C Major, his dedicatee, Franz Liszt, was the rare pianist who could handle its technical challenges and almost schizophrenic mood changes. From its “Durchaus fantastisch” and “Durchaus energisch” (quite fantastic, quite energetic) highs to its tender Beethoven-echoing last movement, Denk brought a Lisztian mastery and virtuosity to this wildly contrasting piece. His encore was a winningly vamped-up ragtime take on Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture.

Some might object that the evening’s program amounted to “ghettoizing” women composers by cramming them into a musical tasting menu pre-intermission (“Add women and stir”) while extended works by the canonical males Brahms and Schumann got the luxury-box treatment post-intermission. But the best way to ensure women’s works someday own the program is to expose listeners to their rich variety and champion them as persuasively as possible. In ranging masterfully over so many unique voices, Denk did just that.

Paul Bodine is a San Diego writer.