Home listening - new releases from Jeremy Denk and Maximilian Hornung

The Guardian 0

Denk journeys through seven centuries, Hornung sticks to 1966. Plus, mind-altering Shostakovich with Stephen Johnson

• c1300-c2000 (Nonesuch), the American pianist Jeremy Denk’s latest release, is just that: 700 years of western classical music encapsulated in 25 short tracks on two CDs. The first disc opens with Machaut, Binchois and Ockeghem – vocal works beguilingly transcribed for keyboard by Denk – moving through to Monteverdi, Purcell and Bach. Denk’s preoccupation is with the development of counterpoint, “music’s superpower”, as he describes it in his own liner notes (Denk is a lucid writer on music; see his many articles in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and the Guardian). Disc 2, on more familiar pianistic terrain, spans Beethoven and Mozart to Stockhausen, Ligeti and Glass. Full of contrast and surprise, this is a richly personal gallery of sound.