Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts

Complete sonatas for violin and piano by Charles Ives
Traditional songs, hymns and marches

Jeremy Denk, piano; Stefan Jackiw violin; members of Houston Chamber Choir

Few composers have drawn as much literal inspiration from their childhood home as the American maverick Charles Ives. Award-winning pianist Jeremy Denk has made a special project of championing the music of Ives. In this imaginative project, Denk, violinist Stefan Jackiw and members of Houston Chamber Choir explore inspiration and Ives’s unparalleled invention, interweaving the original hymns, patriotic songs and marches performed by a quartet of singers with the wildly imaginative sonatas of Ives that those songs inspired.

“Mr. Denk’s playing exuded affinity for Ives and vivid imagination. Mr. Jackiw, deftly balancing fervor and elegance, beautiful tone and earthy colorings, proved a comparably inspired Ivesian on this exciting night.” — The New York Times

“Jackiw and Denk put the difficulties in the background and made these tough scores flow like jazz improvisations.” – Portland Press-Herald

“[Ives’s] music is brilliant, inventive, tender, edgy, wild, original, witty, haunting.” – Jeremy Denk