Pianist Simone Dinnerstein (Photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco)
Anastasia Tsioulcas (AT): Tell me about how this album, "A Strange Beauty"--which is also your debut on Sony Masterworks--came together. You've recorded Bach before, so what did you have in mind for this recording?
Simone Dinnerstein (SD): I wanted to do an all-Bach recording that would combine different elements of his writing—not all French suites, or all preludes and fugues. I thought it would be interesting, as a theme, to use music that Bach re-worked from other music. So, for instance, the chorale that then became a cantata, which he then turned into organ improvisations, and which pianists, beginning in the early 20th century, then used themselves as piano pieces. The concerto pieces I’ve recorded he used again as cantatas, and reworked them into concertos again for other instruments. And the central piece on the recording, the English suite: there, the first movement is written in a concerto style, even though it’s just for keyboard. It shows how he wasn’t instrument-fixated; Bach was someone who thought about music in a more abstract way.
AT: He definitely did rework so much material, and there’s certainly a lot of speculation, and scholarship, about those decisions. Was it that he simply had compositional obligations he had to meet, or do you think it gave him the opportunity to explore some fundamental or foundational ideas in different contexts?
SD: I think it was probably a combination of those two things. When you think about the enormous amount of music that he had to put together every week, I’m sure that the idea of recycling was useful! But I happen to think that there’s something about his writing that has a sense of music being…a kind of purity or abstraction of music that has nothing to do with the reality of a specific instrument or voice. I think he was thinking about form and composition and harmony—I don’t think that he was thinking about timbre. Though I do feel that a lot of his music feels like it has breaths in it, which makes it feel very much like song or spoken word.
AT: We’re really lucky to live in a time that there’s a lot of opportunity for dialog about color in his music, especially when you look from the vantage point of playing on a modern piano versus on a period instrument--those choices allow for very distinct points of view. Obviously, you play on a modern instrument yourself, but do you find yourself drawing upon those other vantage points?
SD: I often feel that people who play with a period-performance style tend to be extremely imaginative in the way that they play. There’s usually a freshness and vitality to their playing, and a kind of freedom, that you don’t always find in people who are playing modern instruments and who aren’t necessarily thinking in that way. What I find interesting is that every musician is trying to get to the core of the music, and we’re all just taking different roads to get there. I think some players who specialize in period performance are thinking about practices of the time, how the instruments worked--the gut strings, the bows--and makes them envision the music in a certain way, and that’s the path of how they get to that core. For me, playing on a modern instrument, on a beautiful Steinway, is what opens up the music to me. That’s how I find that core.
The people with whom I recorded this album, the musicians of the Kammerorchester Staatskapelle Berlin, they tend to be much more informed about period performance practice. In fact, their concertmaster is from the Academy for Ancient Music in Berlin. So they play with a lot of excitement and exuberance and lightness, which I think is really typical of the period-performance players, but their phrasing was very different from how I wanted it to be when we initially got together. So I really had to show them the way I was seeing it, and they were very open to adapting to what I wanted it to sound like, and it did come out the way I wanted it to sound. The fact that they were so flexible helped a lot. I think, actually, if they had all been modern-performance players, they might not have been so flexible! And they were incredibly nice about it. I worried that they might think my ideas strange, or that they wouldn’t be able to translate what I was doing at the piano to string instruments.
To be honest, I hadn’t really had much success with other orchestras in being able to show them exactly how it was that I wanted to shape it. It takes a lot of rehearsing to play it the way I wanted it to be played, and you never get that kind of rehearsal when you go and play with an orchestra. So I prepared quite a bit before we got together; I spoke to some string players, and to some conductors that I really like, and got their feedback about the language I should use to communicate my ideas to them. And in the end, the thing that really helped is that I first played for the orchestra, and they really listened, and then they played for me, and I listened to them. We did this back-and-forth, and sometimes I would stand up and actually conduct them without playing. That was tremendously helpful, and it really worked. They were very committed to trying to figure this out with me. And you know, they play standing up, even during recording sessions, so they were on their feet for six or seven hours a day, playing!
Meanwhile, this amazing concertmaster doesn’t speak any English at all, and I don’t speak any German, so we were communicating just by playing. He found it fascinating, what I was doing, and it was so nice--he’s much older than I am, but he wasn’t patronizing or skeptical in the slightest. He was just really interested in the way I was doing it. And at the end of the whole thing, he told me that it had been like playing Bach with Schumann’s daughter! (laughs)
AT: That’s a pretty great compliment!
SD: I definitely took it as a compliment. (laughs again)
AT: Obviously, Bach is a composer whose work you’ve been really immersed in, and certainly in more recent years.
SD: Probably, yeah.
AT: Do you feel like what you find in his music, or how you choose to play it, has evolved or become more honed in that time?
SD: I think the things that I was really starting to discover say, ten years ago, have developed a lot. I think I’ve become a lot more brave in trying out the things I hear in my head, and that I thought I could see happening in the music, but that I was afraid to try doing. Certainly, having a new and really spectacular instrument is also really changing my playing already--I’m hearing sounds and articulations and timbres that I didn’t hear before when I was practicing.
AT: Tell us about how you first encountered this Steinway that you’ve recently purchased.
SD: I met it in Berlin; I’d chosen it at Steinway to make this recording. During the course of recording, I fell in love with this instrument--it’s just so inspiring. I had things happen at the piano that just hadn’t happened before. I found out at the end of the session that it was for sale, and so I figured out a way of buying it, and we flew it from Berlin to Brooklyn, where we managed to get it up the very narrow stairs of my house, and through an even tinier doorway! And now I have a concert grand taking up an entire room. [laughs] It’s a very beautiful and interesting piano, because even though it’s barely five years old, it has the sound and the richness of a much older instrument, and yet it has the touch and the feeling of a modern instrument. For me, that’s a perfect combination; I’ve always liked very old pianos, but because I perform on new ones so much of the time, I felt as though I needed to be practicing that is similar in action to the ones I’d be performing on.
AT: I don’t think that’s something that a lot of “civilian” listeners think about very often--pianists very often are in the very unique position of having to constantly adapt to new instruments, if you’re touring.
SD: Yeah, it’s both a blessing and a curse for pianists. On the one hand, you never know what you’re going to get--it can be something you really hate! But on the other hand, if you’re playing the same repertoire on many different pianos, it makes you hear things differently about the music that you may not hear if you’re always playing on the same instrument. When you play on a piano that just can’t do something a certain way, then you just have to listen to the piano! And that takes you down a different road than the one you would have otherwise taken.
AT: We’re sitting here in your house surrounded by artwork; your father [painter Simon Dinnerstein] is a visual artist, as is your uncle [Harvey Dinnerstein], and the booklet to this new recording is filled with works painted by your dad. It seems that you’ve been immersed, from your very earliest years, in other art forms besides music. Do you think those experiences have had impact on the way you create art?
SD: Oh for sure, and particularly in terms of comparing painting and drawing to playing the piano. My father would always draw analogies for me when he heard me play, or when we’d listen to something together, or when we were at a museum together, trying to think of how a musical piece would relate to something we were looking at. Or in more specific ways: he’d talk a lot about line. For instance, if you’re drawing a figure, there has to be a line that goes all the way from the top of a person’s head to the feet. Even though the details have to be meticulous, there has to be a greater sense of line to the body. And of course in music, that’s phrasing. And sometimes he’d be listening to me playing and he’d say, “I don’t hear the line.” I’d realize then that I’d been getting bogged down in smaller sections, and not seeing the bigger picture.
It's also true for me in thinking about lights and darks, and even tricks--I remember once looking at a picture my father had done. There was a part that seemed as if there was a lot of light coming through, behind the figure of a person. I told him that the light was really amazing, and he said, "Well actually, what you’re seeing is just the paper.” But it looks like light, like there’s this brightness shining--not the paper at all. I think in music, that can be done as well--there are all sorts of illusions, so to speak, for creating color. I remember my piano teacher growing up, who was a huge Shura Cherkassky fan, told me about this trick where Cherkassky would play with both hands equally weighted, and the left hand would just drop out, the sound would just die, and the right hand would remain just as prominent--but that right hand would suddenly sound as though it were much more quiet, still singing but so quiet. And it was just a matter of the balance. The right hand hadn’t changed at all, but the listener would swear that it had. To me, that’s a lot like showing the paper.
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Ariama asked what other artists have influenced Simone Dinnerstein the most. Some of her touchstone performers:
- "I think when I was growing up, Glenn Gould was a huge influence on me; I was obsessed with him. I remember being about 13 and hearing the second recording of the Goldberg Variations, the 1981 recording, and I got totally absorbed and started collecting as much as I could. And then I met my husband, who is an even bigger Gould freak than I am--he had every single recording that Gould had ever made!"
- "In my twenties, I also started getting interested in older artists, like Schnabel, Cortot, and Lipatti. And then I discovered Rosalyn Tureck, whom I liked very much. And also when I was growing up, I was a huge fan of Mitsuko Uchida--I would just follow her around! I was her groupie." (laughs)
- "Recently, the person I’ve been interested in is Myra Hess; I’ve been listening to a lot of her recordings. I really love them. When people started saying a few years ago that my playing reminded them of hers, I thought, ‘I’d better listen to Myra Hess!’ And it was so strange--I felt so close to it. I still think that I play differently from her for sure, but there is in many ways a very similar sensibility."
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
