“It was a revelation!” wrote the critic in the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung when Jeremy Denk returned to the Ruhr Piano Festival in 2019 after his début two years earlier. Surprising combinations in the American pianist’s programmes create a fascinating synthesis. His Duisburg recital eloquently combines great classics with rarities from the late 19th century by Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, by piano wunderkind “Blind Tom” Wiggins, and by the outstanding ragtime duo formed by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin. In the late 1970s, Frederic Rzewski harked back to Bach as a model when he composed a series of American ballads on the subject of oppression and resistance, and this is only one of the varied, nuanced threads that Jeremy Denk uses in this programme to connect Bach’s partita with Beethoven’s impressive C Minor sonata.