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c.1300-c.2000

Jeremy Denk (piano)

c.1300-c.2000

Awards:

There is plenty of lovely piano-playing here, from a fleet-footed Bach Chromatic Fantasy to an architecturally conceived Isolde’s Liebestod, which is my personal highlight. The choices of repertoire...

c.1300-c.2000

Jeremy Denk (piano)

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This release includes a digital booklet

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Awards:

There is plenty of lovely piano-playing here, from a fleet-footed Bach Chromatic Fantasy to an architecturally conceived Isolde’s Liebestod, which is my personal highlight. The choices of repertoire...

About

Nonesuch Records releases pianist Jeremy Denk's c.1300–c.2000 on February 8, 2019. The two-disc album captures a program of works spanning seven centuries that Denk created and performed at venues including Lincoln Center, Wigmore Hall, and Piano aux Jacobins. "The history of so-called classical music felt closer to me now than it did when I first learned about it in college, not just more relevant, but more alive. Wouldn't it be amazing, I wondered, to experience this sweep and arc in one sitting?" For that program, Denk performed twenty-four pieces by composers ranging from Machaut to Ligeti—with Binchois, Gesualdo, Stockhausen, Philip Glass, and many others in the middle.

Denk says in the liner note, "You might call this album a version of time-lapse photography, which brings us from the 1300s to the present day in a series of sonic snapshots. I was aiming for a healthy mixture of light and dark, of optimism and pessimism." He continues, "To find a foothold, I started in the medieval era with two threads: the secular, and the religious. Worldly love, and love of God. At the same time, I felt it was essential to deal with a more purely musical love: the art of counterpoint, a foundation of the long story to come. If you don't care about counterpoint, you should. It is music's superpower, something it can do that no other art form quite can."

Contents and tracklist

Awards and reviews

  • Presto Editor's Choice
    February 2019

March 2019

There is plenty of lovely piano-playing here, from a fleet-footed Bach Chromatic Fantasy to an architecturally conceived Isolde’s Liebestod, which is my personal highlight. The choices of repertoire on the second disc are never less than thought-provoking…Yet the conceptual flaws of the project remain glaring.

February 2019

Denk’s whistle-stop tour through seven centuries of music frustrates almost as much as it beguiles (the teasing inclusion of a single movement of Beethoven’s final sonata sent me back to the pianist’s complete recording in mild exasperation) - but I’ve found myself dipping in and out of this eclectic, ambitious album all month, chiefly for the hypnotic, unapologetically inauthentic takes on Janequin, Ockhegem and Dufay, and readings of Monteverdi and Gesualdo which throw the music’s radical qualities into stark relief.

10th February 2019

It’s thrilling and deft, yet almost best in the background, periodically administering a stylistic jolt.
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