The Berlin Concert

We Say...

Review by Jayson Greene

When Simone Dinnerstein's career launched unexpectedly into the stratosphere two years ago, it's safe to say that no one was more taken aback than Dinnerstein herself. She was, after all, a 35-year-old piano teacher and mother living in Park Slope, Brooklyn at the time her self-financed debut CD came out, a take on Bach's Goldberg Variations so deeply personal that listening to it sometimes felt like eavesdropping. And while 35 is still young by "Park Slope mom" standards, by the skewed metric of solo piano careers, it puts you roughly in league with Methuselah.

Nonetheless, Dinnerstein's Variations hit some mysterious nerve cluster, gathering momentum with a force that would confound Malcolm Gladwell. After being picked up by the Telarc label, the album went on to outsell The White Stripes on Amazon.com, garnering Dinnerstein a hailstorm of solo recital dates and orchestra bookings, a segment on NPR's "Morning Edition," and a big feature in The New York Times.

For a minute, in fact, it seemed like the runaway train of Dinnerstein's Goldberg Variations was threatening to derail her preternatural composure. Happily, with her follow-up disc, it seems as though Dinnerstein has ultimately refused to allow her sudden ascent to disturb the unearthly poise that made her Variations so beguiling.

This live album is taken from a recital Dinnerstein gave last November in Berlin, and while it isn't exactly a departure from her beloved Bach — the concert opens with his French Suite No. 5 — it represents at least an elaboration on her well-traveled territory. Besides the suite, Dinnerstein offers American composer (and Juilliard professor) Philip Lasser's 2002 work Twelve Variations on Chorale by J.S. Bach, as well as Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32. The sonata, a technically fearsome beast, is an idiosyncratic, even slightly rambling work, with an odd, ersatz-swing second movement. Dinnerstein doesn't sound entirely at home in it; it could have been an off night, or it could be that Dinnerstein is just less comfortable with Beethoven's stormy unpredictability as she is with the equanimity of Bach.

Lasser's Twelve Variations, meanwhile, taps into the deep well of spirituality in Bach's music, and Dinnerstein handles the work with the same thoughtful, lingering touch she brings to the master. There is, in fact, an almost spiritual discipline at work in all her interpretations: each phrase is carefully enunciated, with utter clarity, yet she is still capable of making the air dance with the lightness of her tone. Over and over again, Dinnerstein displays the uncanny ability to make technically flawless playing feel conversational, and on the Bach and the Lasser, she conjures a pensive stillness that I would love to hear her apply to, say, Erik Satie's Gymnopedies. With the Berlin Concert, Dinnerstein again proves there is no more singular voice playing Bach today; one can only eagerly await hearing what she does with the rest of the canon.