Selected quotes from past reviews

“Guest pianist Jeremy Denk was the pyrogenic force in every piece he played.  He commands a huge range of colors and dynamics… from the ghostly haze in the opening of the Improvisation … to the heroic assertion of the ‘Heldenleben’-like finale. He has an unerring sense of the music’s dramatic structure and a great actor’s intuition for timing … he was the provocateur who urged his colleagues to dare all, to unleash every calorie of emotional heat.” — Ellen Pfeifer, Boston Globe, Monday Aug. 26, 2002

“There was a major work from the early 20th century, Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with Jeremy Denk, the brilliant soloist … Hearing Mr. Denk’s bracing, effortlessly virtuosic and utterly joyous performance, one would never guess how phenomenally difficult the piano part is.” — Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, Oct. 27, 2001

“The really thrilling performance of the afternoon … was that of the Schumann Piano Concerto with Jeremy Denk as soloist. A young artist with a string of prizes and prestigious engagements, Denk is a lot more than just an athletic pianist. This was clear from the first bars in which Schumann’s dotted chords crackled with energy. He plays not only with a wonderful rhythmic drive, but with a wide range of dynamics, a supple way of shaping phrases, and a free but not excessive employment of rubato.” — Ellen Pfeifer, Boston Globe, Sep. 2000

“it was his reading of Beethoven’s Sonata in E (Op. 109) that gave his program its center. His playing presented a completely imagined and proportioned structure that stressed the music’s lyricism and poetry. The opening had a golden resonance. The pacing of the entire work forced attention on the music itself, culminating in the intensely lyric variations in the last movement. The logic that propelled his playing gave his occasional understatements extraordinary power.” — Daniel Webster, Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 22, 1998

“You had to be glowing after the Mozart, Fauré and Beethoven performances Tuesday. The concert was almost too good to have hoped for … has Denk, or anybody else, ever played pianissimos so intensely? … I’ve heard major personalities like Joshua Bell and Jean-Yves Thibaudet blast their way through the Kreutzer and heard nothing new in the music itself. Not so with Kim and Denk…

Amid a concert that one might call, in the spirit of actor Spalding Gray, ‘a perfect moment,’ you could marvel at the $15 ticket price and grieve at the lack of recording devices on hand. But like most perfect moments, this one is most accurately preserved in one’s heart.” — David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 15, 2004 (review of Soovin Kim/Jeremy Denk duo recital)

“… the word hasn’t spread around enough as yet about Jeremy Denk … What he accomplished gave testimony that he is a great pianist, no less. It was so clearly evident that here is an artist who has worked his way through the music not only with his hands but with his mind and with his heart… Here was brilliant and individualistic pianism. One rarely hears music so indelibly performed, as it was through these two Denk-enriched afternoons.” — Peter Jacobi, Bloomington Herald-Times, March 26, 2000