Renowned classical pianist Jeremy Denk will perform this weekend with the IRIS Orchestra, and one work, Schumann’s Piano Concerto, is a piece he has loved since he was a child.

“It’s one of the pieces I enjoy playing the most,” he says, “because it’s perfectly Schumann: incredibly romantic and playful.”

This is Denk’s first guest appearance with IRIS, although he was in town last year performing with violinist Joshua Bell.

This is also somewhat of a first for IRIS. For the first time the orchestra will perform not only at its home at the Germantown Performing Arts Center, but will offer a repeat Sunday on the Ole Miss campus.

It’s part of an effort to spread the name and impact of IRIS, particularly aiming at music students. Throughout the season IRIS is also having master classes at area schools featuring guest artists.

Denk is an inspired communicator, and not only from the musical keyboard. His Web site — jeremydenk.net — has a blog worth checking out. “Think Denk” is full of musings about a range of notions that come to his attention, from Walt Whitman, to dogs as muses.

But in one entry in particular, he goes to a concert to, as he puts it, “get my Schumann on.” There we glimpse his passion for the composer, and in a recent telephone interview, he expanded on the piano concerto.

“I have the feeling that his idea was to write something that his wife, Clara, would approve of, so it had this more classical proportion than some of the unusual experimental pieces Schumann did,” Denk says.

“It’s interesting to see that Schumannesque manic romanticism meeting classical form. It’s a fascinating mixture because the kind of phrases that Schumann often decided to write didn’t always fit in the conventional sonatas in the way that Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven phrases would.”

The piece was not universally embraced. Franz Liszt snarkily called it “a piano concerto without a piano.”

Denk says the relationship between the Schumanns and Liszt was a complicated one.

“They were friends for a while, but they took very different artistic paths,” he says.

Liszt was very much about being the dramatic virtuoso, but Schumann, Denk says, felt that “virtuosity should serve the music, not just show off the fast fingers of the pianist.”

Denk notes that the concerto’s first movement actually contains some ideas that are very Lisztian.

“Schumann constructed this whole incredible long thread of music reworking one idea in all kinds of different ways. Liszt might have gotten some of that from Schumann, however much he might have denied that.”

But the rivalry was something that both sides may have relished.

“A lot of that,” Denk says, “was the kind of banter you see now between Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow.”

IRIS Orchestra with pianist Jeremy Denk

The concert is at 8 p.m. Saturday at Germantown Performing Arts Center, 1801 Exeter Rd. The program: Schumann’s Piano Concerto, Michael Daugherty’s “Tell My Fortune,” Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 “Italian”. Tickets: $55; dress rehearsal (Saturday, 10 a.m.-1 p.m.) $10. Call 751-7500 or irisorchestra.org.

The Oxford, Miss., concert is at 3 p.m. Sunday at Ford Center for the Performing Arts, 100 University Ave. Tickets: $20-$28. Call 662 915-7411 or olemiss.edu/depts/tickets.