BURGER SCOOT

I have a love for Beethoven’s music. More so than Mozart, J.S. Bach, or even, going back to my college days, when I was a rabid fan of The Clash and artists like Bruce Springsteen. I think Beethoven’s passion came through so clearly in his symphonies, piano concertos, piano sonatas, string quartets, and other works.

At the time, my girlfriend, tired of suggesting I try classical music, appeared at my door unannounced one rainy evening with a copy of Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8 by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer. She told me to try it. If I didn’t like it, I could toss the vinyl, and she wouldn’t bug me anymore about trying out classical music.

I accepted the album, and when I went to bed that night, I put on my headphones and played Side A, which happened to be Symphony No. 7 in A Major. I’m not going to bullshit the reader and say “my mind was blown and from that point on I never looked back, blah, blah, blah,” but Ludwig had a hook in me. It’s funny, but I don’t know if things would have changed the way they did if, say, Symphony No. 8, Side B, were the first piece I listened to. Mind you, with all subsequent spins of the A side of that record, most of the time I flipped it over to play side B. I grew to appreciate No. 8 just like I grew to appreciate the first four symphonies. When I bought Symphony No. 9 in C Major “Ode to Joy,” I loved it even more than No. 7. (For the whole history of my record collecting, mostly of popular artists like The Clash, Springsteen, Dylan, The Beatles, and a hell of a lot more, check out my revised blog post My Short Love Affair with Music—A Remix.)

But let’s stick with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, I played this piece of music to death all those years ago but have not collected or interpretively listened to classical music (or any other kind of music, for that matter) in over twenty years. But on October 11 of this year, Jeremy Denk and the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera performed this piece and I felt homesick. Denk brought more inspiration to it than I think I have ever heard before. (Remember, it has been a long time since I have seriously collected and interpretively listened to music.) What was interesting was that it sounded new, or at least different, to me. I can’t be sure, but I swear Denk took some artistic license and made it, um, better. There, I said it! If he did in fact reinvent the master’s fourth piano concerto, a piece that is on virtually everyone’s own version of the Standard Repertoire that took some nuggets.

Denk’s “version” reminded me of a most likely apocryphal exchange between a music student and his teacher that is useful here:

Student: “But he’s playing the piece all wrong, master.”

Teacher: “You should play so wrong.”

Perhaps I am wrong, maybe Denk played the work as Beethoven had written it. Still, something seemed different and it was a very pleasing distinction.

Denk responded to the audience’s enthusiastic encore, prefacing, “If you don’t know, this is a version of a piece by Richard Wagner. And I apologize to all the Wagner fans in the audience.” Then he played what I believe was a leitmotif for piano from one of the operas in Der Ring des Nibelungen. Denk’s reason for the apology became evident 30 seconds into the two-minute piece, when he sped it up to sound more like the kind of playing one might hear accompanying a saloon fight in a western movie or TV show. He kept increasing the tempo until his hands looked like a blur. It was an unexpected treat.

Aside from his concert schedule and discography, Jeremy Denk has written a New York Times bestseller, Every Good Boy Does Fine, a memoir of his musical education and training. I thought I overheard him say he is working on a book about Beethoven, though I haven’t verified this as of the time of publishing this post. Denk has also written for publications like The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Guardian, and The New York Times Book Review. His March 4, 2025, piece in The New Yorker, Denk discusses a few musical books that grapple with the cultural and political divisions in the United States — a fascinating topic.