A truly lovely remembrance of the late pianist Charles Rosen by Jeremy Denk over at the New Yorker:

At the end of the corridor was the nerve center: a piano stacked with music, a desk stuffed with papers, a threadbare couch, and a book-covered coffee table. It was desperately unhip. But it was affecting and intense, the accumulation of things, of ideas, and Charles’s shuffle.

Listen to Rosen play Chopin here.

Listen to the Fresh Air interview with Denk here.

How to interpret eight fortes? I think maybe I should hurl my whole body at the piano as violently as possible and hope for the best. They would find my bloody corpse weeks later amid the moldy coffee cups, odiferous testament to my devotion to the composer’s intent. How would eight be different from seven? Both must be so searingly loud as to be painful, a distinction between degrees of agony: if seven fortes is like being disemboweled by a wolf, then eight is like being disemboweled by a bear.

— Jeremy Denk, on Ligeti’s instructions to play eight fortes in Automne a Varsovie.

Not many classical pianists maintain blogs where they ruminate on everything from eating a terrible bowl of meatballs while on tour with Joshua Bell to seeing Twilight: New Moon (twice) and hearing strains of a Schubert song.

But then, not many classical pianists are Jeremy Denk.On today’s Fresh Air, Denk talks about playing Beethoven and Ligeti, who “took the piano to places it had never been before, and makes demands of the pianist and the mind that had never been made before.”

Tomorrow:pianist Jeremy Denk