Simone Dinnerstein Essentials

Brooklyn-based Simone Dinnerstein was 13 years old when she first heard Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The experience would shape her career in the years to come, inspiring her to study Bach at the Juilliard School with Peter Serkin and make her own distinctive recording of the work, which stormed the U.S. classical charts within the first week of its release in 2007. Bach continued as a theme in her recording career, with a 2008 disc entitled The Berlin Concert, which features his French Suite No. 5 (1725) alongside other Bach-related works by Beethoven and American composer Philip Lasser. She launched her new contract with Sony Classical with her chart-topping 2011 recording, Bach: A Strange Beauty, featuring lively performances of Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ (1732) and "Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring" (1723). But the pianist who once dropped out of Juilliard to follow her own path, taking up studies with Maria Curcio in London, is not one to restrict herself to Baroque music. She has collaborated with singer/songwriter Tift Merrit on a song cycle, Night (2013), in which classical and folk styles collide, and Schubert, Billie Holiday and Brad Mehldau are also drawn into the mix. Undersong, her third album born out of the pandemic, explores the idea of repetition in music by Philip Glass, Satie and others.