The title of pianist Simone Dinnerstein's latest Sony release is Something Almost Being Said. Despite the title, taken from one of the lines in Phillip Larkin's poem, "The Trees," her performance on the CD certainly does speak, quite loudly, of her virtuosity while capturing the intimacy of the music.
The subtitle of the album is Music of Bach and Schubert - music that, Ms. Dinnerstein says is, very personal to her. In fact, as she tells Jill, in mentioning to her husband that this music "feels like it's saying something that couldn't be said in words," he responded with Larkin's poem. The opening lines of "The Trees" are:
"The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said,
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief..."
http://youtu.be/a-LqQ5hFkJQ
Ms. Dinnerstein's "career tree" started to take root as she studied in the pre-college program at the Manhattan School of Music with Solomon Mikowsky. She later attended The Juilliard School of Music and was a student of Peter Serkin. She also studied in London with Maria Curcio.
Her break came with the self-financed recording of J.S. Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Released by Telarc in 2007, the disc hit No. 1 on the Billboard Classical chart within one week, and outsold most rock CDs on Amazon.com. The CD appeared on a number of “Best of 2007” lists, including those of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, iTunes “Editor’s Choice Best Classical,” Amazon.com Best CDs of 2007, and Barnes & Noble's Top 5 Debut CDs of 2007.
The three albums Ms. Dinnerstein has released since then: The Berlin Concert (Telarc), Bach: A Strange Beauty (Sony), and the aforementioned Something Almost Being Said (Sony), ?have also topped the classical charts, with Bach: A Strange Beauty making the Billboard Top 200, which compiles the entire music industry's sales of albums in all genres. Ms. Dinnerstein was the best-selling instrumentalist of 2011 on the U.S. Billboard Classical chart and was included in NPR's 2011 100 Favorite Songs from all genres.
Listen to an encore broadcast of this interview, with extended musical performances, on Friday, January 18th at 7 pm on WRTI's All-Classical Stream and HD-2.
