Op het verzoek van het Lincoln Centre in New York stelde Jeremy Denk een recital samen met werken van 1300 tot nu. De oudste werken zoals Doulz amis van Machaut en
het Kyrie uit de Missa Pange Lingua van Despres (beiden in transcriptie) via Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart en Van Beethoven naar Stockhausen, Glass en Ligeti. In twee uur tijd komt 700 jaar muziekgeschiedenis langs. Een fascinerend album met een gedegen toelichting van Jeremy Denk op de werken die hij voor dit albums heeft gekozen.
c.1300-c.2000
Jeremy Denk (piano)
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."
