Timo Andres, Jeremy Denk, Brad Mehldau, Randy Newman – I Still Play (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 39:18 minutes | 444 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nonesuch
The existence of I Still Play as an album is a bit of a paradox. Each of these 11 tributes to [former Nonesuch president] Bob Hurwitz was written for an audience of one, on a particular Steinway in a specific Upper West Side living room. And yet here they are, making their way into the wider world. None are loftily ambitious or daringly experimental compositions. Rather, each distills an aspect of its author’s voice to a concentrated miniature. The prevailing tone is conversational rather than declamatory, though it’s a wide-ranging conversation. Large questions are posed but rarely answered in full. If the listener has the odd feeling of having stumbled into an exchange between two friends and missing an inside joke or shared reference here and there—that’s not far from the truth.
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The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra & Jeremy Denk – Mozart Piano Concertos (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:53 minutes | 1,16 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nonesuch
Pianist Jeremy Denk is the closest thing classical music has to a public intellectual in his native U.S., with his booklet notes to this live performance offering an excellent example. Technical and yet personal, they provide a kind of play-by-play to the interpretations offered here, which are quite detailed and yet lively. Although the recording was made before the coronavirus reared its ugly receptors, it was released in 2021, and Denk alludes to the periodic and seemingly random C minor shades in the big C major opening movement of the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503, as suggesting that we now “have to live with uncertainty.” As it happens, details of this kind are where Denk excels. One might disagree with him along the way; the tempo shifts in the finale of the Piano Concerto in D minor, K. 466, push the Mozartian language to its limits, but his ideas are well-formed enough that he tends to sweep the listener along with him. He is aided here by the fact that he is conducting the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra from the keyboard in a performance that is unusually well-integrated between soloist and orchestra. Nonesuch retains some of the enthusiastic applause in its live sound, which is clear. This recording has made classical sales charts in Britain, where the reputation of this unique musician appears to be spreading.
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Jeremy Denk – c.1300-c.2000 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:40:49 minutes | 1,57 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Nonesuch
American pianist Jeremy Denk is known for unusual programs that juxtapose wildly different kinds of music, but nothing he has done before approaches the novelty of c.1300-c.2000, which is exactly what it sounds like: a survey of seven centuries of music, played on the piano. It’s hard to say what Denk is up to here. The earlier pieces are not keyboard transcriptions but simple arrangements of pieces of medieval and Renaissance polyphony, carefully rendered versions of what a music history teacher might play during a class to illustrate the various styles. Then, at the beginning of the second disc in the physical release, Denk shifts gears into actual piano music. However, even here, his method is not really clear: Mozart is represented by the slow movement of the “easy” Piano Sonata in C major, K. 545, but that’s followed by the mighty opening movement of Beethoven’s final sonata, the Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111. Denk says of the first part of the program that “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.” Yet the piano works on the album don’t pick up this thread. All this said, Denk is often, as usual, quite compelling (sample the first disc’s corker of a Bach Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903), and there’s an X factor here that gives the pianist points for sheer adventurousness in trying something absolutely new. Denk fans are likely to be quite pleased with this latest chapter.
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![Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, Jeremy Denk, Academy of St Martin in the Fields - For the Love of Brahms (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2023/04/01/0886445820348_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, Jeremy Denk, Academy of St Martin in the Fields – For the Love of Brahms (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:22 minutes | 1,50 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical
Heartland American violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis have known each other for many years and have often performed together. This release, spearheaded by Bell in his post as music director of the venerable Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, is a bit unwieldy, but has moments that make it worth the time and money of Bell fans especially. The three works, loosely linked by the concept described in the title, have their background abundantly described by Isserlis in the booklet. The Double Concerto for violin and cello in A minor, Op. 102, is conducted by Bell from the violin. There are moments that show his star quality, contrasting nicely with the detailed, concentrated approach of Isserlis, and the relatively small size of the Academy probably approximates the way Brahms imagined the work. There are smoother versions of this curiously restrained, deliberate work, however. In the slow movement of the Schumann Violin Concerto in D minor, WoO 23, Isserlis takes an orchestral cello line as a solo for no very good reason. The album finishes strongly, however, with the original 1854 version of the Piano Trio in B major, Op. 8, which Brahms reworked in 1889 but did not, as Isserlis points out, discard (and he discarded plenty of other music). It’s a passionate, tumultuous work of Brahms’ youth, and Isserlis and Bell come together with pianist Jeremy Denk to make the best possible case for it. Sample the “Scherzo” with its daring rhythmic shift to waltz, and hear Bell’s way with the expressive violin parts of the outer movements, and you’ll come to understand Brahms’ ambivalent attitude toward this early work. The 1854 version of the work is less often recorded than the 1889 reworking, and a fine, stirring performance of it is reason enough to pay the admission price here. ~AllMusic Review by James Manheim
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