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A few years ago, just before her career took off and while she was still under the aegis of Astral Performing Artists, pianist Simone Dinnerstein played J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations at the Trinity Center for Urban Life. I'd been looking forward especially to that concert, not just because of the Bach, but because Dinnerstein had originally scheduled the Beethoven last piano sonata, Op. 111, on the same concert. I couldn't believe any pianist, let alone a relative unknown, would have the nerve to schedule both of these works together— and, indeed, in the end Dinnerstein didn't play the Beethoven sonata. Instead, she opened with Anton Webern's Piano Variations, Op. 27.
In its way, her choice of the Webern was as nervy as the Beethoven would have been. It is, I think, the masterpiece of the second Viennese school of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern: delicate and lyrical but rigorously serial and completely free from the strictures of tonality. Dinnerstein played it as if it were Mozart: gracefully and transparently. As beautiful as her rendering of the Goldberg Variations was, it's the Webern that I remember most vividly. How, I wondered in awe, can any mortal memorize that work?
Last spring, at the intermission of an Astral celebratory concert, Dinnerstein appeared with Natalie Zhu in a performance of Mozart's Double Piano Concerto. On that occasion, I had the opportunity to ask her that very question. She looked at me as if this was the oddest thing she'd ever been asked, and replied, "The way you'd memorize any other piece!"
Sigh. Maybe the way she would. I let it go at that.
Since that performance, Simone Dinnerstein has gone on to establish a solid career for herself. The Bach is one of her signature works, as it was for Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould— very elite company, indeed. Dinnerstein's adventurous programming and her penchant for Bach, late Beethoven, and 20th-Century repertory remind me of another star in the current firmament of young concert pianists: Jeremy Denk.
On Friday, October 24th, she'll tie up some loose ends when she plays a program that includes the Webern Op. 27, the Beethoven Op. 111, more Bach, and the Copland Piano Variations. It's a program even more formidable than the one she might have played, but didn't, that afternoon I first heard her at the Trinity Center.
What, When, Where
Simone Dinnerstein, pianist: Copland, Webern, Bach, Lasser, Beethoven. October 24, 2008 at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Parkway and 26th St. Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, (215) 569-8080 or http://www.pcmsconcerts.org.
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