Timo Andres / Jeremy Denk / Brad Mehldau / Randy Newman I STILL PLAY

 I STILL PLAY

Jeremy Denk J.S. BACH Goldberg Variations

A feature of Jeremy Denk's work as a pianist – a blisteringly original, thoughtful one at that – is his parallel skill at writing about music. In this unrushed, transparent, unmannered account of the Goldbergs, he provides an invaluable DVD of "video" programme notes, a bonus for anyone still trying to comprehend these variations, which I suspect is all of us. With unvarnished honesty Denk has said: "The best reason to hate the Goldberg Variations – aside from the obvious reason that everyone asks you all the time which of the two [Glenn Gould] recordings you prefer – is that everybody loves them… I worried for years that I would be seduced into playing them, and would become like all the others – besotted, cultish – and that is exactly what happened." This CD is another to cherish in the huge catalogue of Goldberg recordings. (FionaMaddocks / The Guardian)

Jeremy Denk c.1300 - c. 2000

Pianist Jeremy Denk's new album, c.1300–c.2000, is out now on Nonesuch Records. The double 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.

"A piano recital covering 700 years of music: by most accepted definitions, that ought to be not just an oxymoron but an impossibility," says the Telegraph. "But the usual barriers fall whenever Jeremy Denk is at the keyboard ... Quite exhilarating."

"Full of contrast and surprise, this is a richly personal gallery of sound," says the Observer.

"Life, of course, runs in cycles," says NPR, "and Denk's c.1300–c.2000 lets us know that music—with its special powers of creation, expiration and restoration—does, too."

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."

Joshua Bell / Academy of St. Martin in the Fields FOR THE LOVE OF BRAHMS

With a career spanning more than 30 years as a soloist, chamber musician, recording artist and conductor, Joshua Bell is one of the most celebrated violinists of his era. An exclusive Sony Classical artist, Bell has recorded more than 40 CDs garnering Grammy, Mercury, Gramophone and Echo Klassik awards and is recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize. Named the Music Director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in 2011, he is the only person to hold this post since Sir Neville Marriner formed the orchestra in 1958. In September 2016, Sony Classical releases Bell’s newest album, For the Love of Brahms, with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Jeremy Denk.

A tribute to the love and friendship shared by Brahms and Schumann, the album is Joshua’s latest with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (where he has served as Music Director since 2011) and highlights his longstanding relationship with the orchestra as well as two guest artists: cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Jeremy Denk.

The album is the the first recording of an unusual coupling: Brahms’s well-known Double Concerto, with Joshua and Steven paired with the slow movement of Schumann’s rarely heard Violin Concerto arranged with a codetta by Benjamin Britten. Joshua, Steven, and Jeremy then unite for Brahms’s first published chamber work, the Piano Trio in B Major, heard here in its rarely performed 1854 version.