Simone Dinnerstein & Baroklyn: Complicité
Supertrain Records

Simone Dinnerstein is a preeminent classical pianist, but she's also an innovator, someone fervently committed to extending traditional performance practices into bold new areas. Her world premiere presentation of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University was a multi-media production that used as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein's painting The Fulbright Triptych and Ives's Piano Sonata No. 2. To premiere Richard Danielpour's An American Mosaic, written for those affected by the pandemic, she performed the work on multiple pianos throughout Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. And now, perpetuating her passion for innovation, she's just released Complicité, her first album with her recently formed string ensemble Baroklyn (a portmanteau of Baroque and Brooklyn, where she lives), which she directs from the piano.

In presenting material by J. S. Bach, the album signifies a return of sorts for Dinnerstein, who first came to attention through a 2007 recording of The Goldberg Variations; even then, her approach reflected a fine balance between respecting the score as written and imposing her own interpretation. Her focus isn't limited to a single composer, however: Philip Glass, for example, wrote his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, and she also participated in the premiere of André Previn and Tom Stoppard's Penelope. On Complicité, Dinnerstein and Baroklyn are joined by mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano and on oboe d'amore Peggy Pearson. The programme is all Bach, though the final setting, In the Air, is billed as a “recomposition” by Philip Lasser of Bach's always entrancing Air on the G String. Coupling Dinnerstein's Steinway and the ensemble's twelve strings (seven violins, two violas, two cellos, bass) with the woodwind and vocals makes for a rich and rewarding presentation.

The album title means togetherness in English, and it's a principle Dinnerstein consciously applied to the recording process. When recording the second aria in Bach's Cantata 170, for instance, not only did she have the musicians assemble in a semi-circle around her, she had the string players “move around the semi-circle one at a time, each playing a few notes and passing it to the next person during the breath … If you listen closely, you can hear the music move from the left speaker to the right.” True to her nature, the pianist and Baroklyn present a number of pieces in new arrangements that are creative re-imaginings of the original material. Their treatment of the chorale prelude, Herr Gott, nun schleuß den Himmel auf, serves as an apt example for the way they extend an arrangement Alan Fletcher created for Pearson and Dinnerstein into one featuring more players. According to the pianist, they experimented in the studio with different ways of distributing the parts, one musician playing the chorale, another pizzicato, another double stops, and so on. Adding to the piece's allure, its material is presented twice, the first time slowly and with graceful dignity, the second run-through slightly faster. Dinnerstein's piano winds like a tributary throughout, the rapid pace of her patterns contrasting with the slower unfurl of the instruments around her.

The three-part Keyboard Concerto in E Major begins with a spirited allegro the pianist bounds through with authority. The strings are her enthusiastic dance partner, and the two sustain a zestful flow for eight minutes. A plaintive slow movement follows that the musicians engage with deeply, the strings here punctuating the pianist's expressive aria with sensitively calibrated chords. A second allegro reinstates the radiance of the opener to give a satisfying symmetrical shape to the whole. The lustrous sound of the ensemble's strings are used to powerful effect in the chorale lament Der Leib zwar in der Erden, especially when the pianist and Pearson don't enter until the midpoint, piano first and oboe d'amore second.

Comprising three arias and two short recitatives, Cantata 170, Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust is at approximately twenty-six minutes long the album's primary statement. It's elevated quickly when the poignant opening aria adds Cano's sublime voice to the ensemble, the singer coupling magnificently with the strings and piano. The second aria, “Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen,” arrests for he stark tone of its intro and the relative austerity of the arrangement. As Cano intones gloriously, Dinnerstein accompanies her with a piano part that wends its way through highly chromatic territory. Pushing past the three-minute mark, some modicum of brightness seeps in before the material returns to its lamenting origins. Alternations between the moods continue, their transitions effected fluidly but the shifts noticeable nonetheless (particularly exquisite is the unison passage between Dinnerstein and Pearson that arrives near the end). Rather than conclude the piece on a dour note, Bach smartly capped the cantata with the sunny third aria “Mir Kelt, meh zu leben.”

June 2025