Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio

If chamber music were an Olympic sport, one could hardly imagine a more formidable dream team than the trio of violinist Joshua Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis, and pianist Jeremy Denk. The three are each considered among the elite on their instruments as recitalists and symphonic soloists as well as other formats, and in many ways are at the forefront of redefining the roles and influence of classical musicians in our time.

While the trio of longtime friends and collaborators has performed in various formats sporadically in the years since connecting, separately, at the Spoleto Festival, they are just now embarking on their first official tour, which includes a date at the Granada Theatre on Tuesday, May 7. (Isserlis and Denk will also conduct free master classes with UCSB students surrounding the concert, cello at 2:30 pm Tuesday in UCSB Music Building 1145, and piano at 9 am Wednesday in UCSB Geiringer Hall.)

Denk – who will also return as a faculty member of the Music Academy of the West this summer – discussed the connections, choices, conflict resolution, and more over the phone from his home in New York earlier this week. 

Q. How did you decide to get together as a trio, and why was this important enough to fit a tour into your crowded calendar? 

A. The piano trio repertoire is amazing and it’s a chance for us to make this music at the highest level possible. We all admire each other as musicians and people and it’s great to talk about the repertoire as we rehearse and perform. It’s like a three-way friendship. 

Why do you think you work so well together, given that each of you is a major soloist on your own?

We have a lot of experience playing together in different ways, so we know each other musically… We each bring different, complementary things to the table, but we also share a lot. Josh and I have a storytelling impulse, which is to bring the musical narrative to life as vividly as possible, and keep you on the edge of your seat as to what will happen next. Steven and I share extra musical things, and also a deep understanding of the architecture. Each of us is a very strong personality. It’s about fitting together all these desires, like we’re each different pieces of the puzzle.

Can you elaborate on that, how your passions align?

Steven is extremely attuned to the beautiful craftsmanship, the elegance of the structure, almost like clockwork – the way [a piece] all fits together, which creates a great spine. Josh is attuned to the coloristic world, how it shifts from one thing to another. It’s hard for me to talk about myself – like it’s a job interview where you are supposed to explain your strengths (laughs)… I like colors too, but also the little rhythmic things in a phrase that make it interesting, the added spices and imaginations… But each of us has a different idea of what we are (laughs). They’d probably say other things about themselves and me. 

I’m also curious about how you align in bringing the “storytelling” vision to fruition. Are there discussions about how to communicate those elements?

We start by trying to choose music that we felt would come together well on, that would suit us as a group, and our different temperaments… The Shostakovich is a very clear, terrible, great work of art about the Holocaust. There’s a lot of obvious Jewish music, dances of death, and morbid kind of obsessive skeletal and spectral music. We all know the story. It’s a question of how to tell it in the most truthful possible way. Which can be tricky with Shostakovich because he’s often working in an ironic, sarcastic vein. How do you tell irony truthfully?

Mendelssohn is less obvious, the question is whether the story is more playful and lyrical in a given phrase, where the climax is, how we want to shape a passage. [The piece] has all these amazing places where the music is storming along and suddenly it goes into weird islands of repose. It’s hard to keep the sections of storm and repose in balance, so we have worked on that a lot. 

Are there conflicts, ego issues, even creative differences, and how are they resolved?

We talk them out and try to figure out a way to find common ground – like in any relationship (laughs). A lot of time, though, the talk is not that productive. What often happens is one of us plays a passage and the others nod and say, “Let’s do that.” I’ve found playing can be a lot better than talking during rehearsals.

Is it more a matter of compromise than collaboration, meaning, are you each giving up something or finding a place of intersection, like a Venn diagram?

Each case is different. Oftentimes you discover that you want the same things, even though it sounds like you’re saying something opposite. But other times the visions can be completely different and it’s a matter of finding a way for it to make sense for each of us, rearrange your thinking.

You’ve talked about two of the works on the program. I am wondering how it came together as a whole.

It’s kind of a tragedy sandwich. There is a lot of very ecstatic music of one kind or another. The outer pieces are more joyful than the middle ones. The Jewish connection between the Mendelssohn and Shostakovich makes for an interesting narrative, and the very young, emotive Rachmaninoff as tragic Russian leads to the luminescent sound world of Ravel, which is quite different from the other pieces, using sound in and of itself as an object for contemplation. 

Your latest solo album is ca. 1300-2000, quite a concept. How do you distill 700 years into a single album?

You make a number of impossible and heartbreaking choices. I tried to make it a story, not in any way a music lesson, but a kaleidoscope or time-lapse photography situation in which you could feel the evolution of changing values and ways of thinking about music, following various threads. Like a giant biography of classical musical styles, with lots of cliffhangers, places where it gets very exciting as composers are discovering, and others when everyone is wondering what’s next.

Did things change dramatically when you received the MacArthur grant? Or rather, how does that experience resonate now?

I tried not to let it affect me. I just saved the money and thought about which projects I might want to do. I still haven’t done any, because there’s too much on my plate already. But it made me focus on my craft a bit, and think about the things that are important to me and that I feel I have to contribute to the artistic world.

Classical Correction

The item in last week’s column about Opera Santa Barbara’s production of The Crucible featured a quote from director Stephanie Havey that was truncated from a longer response in which Havey had said, “There is so much more than tying it in with political divisions.” Our apologies if the editing perhaps left a mistaken impression that the show was more about “Trumpism” than timeless “human imperfection,” of which, perhaps, the item itself was an example.