Sony Classical will release pianist Simone Dinnerstein's second album Something Almost Being Said: Music of Bach and Schubert, internationally on January 30, 2012 and in the US on January 31, 2012. The new album combines J. S. Bach's Partitas Nos. 1 and 2, with Schubert's Four Impromptus, Op. 90, and was recorded at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York by Grammy-winning producer Adam Abeshouse. The album's title is taken from English poet Philip Larkin's poem, The Trees.
Something Almost Being Said follows the 2011 release of Dinnerstein's Bach: A Strange Beauty, which immediately earned the No. 1 spot on the US Billboard Classical Chart, and is one of the few classical albums to make the Billboard Top 200, compiling the entire music industry's top selling albums in all genres. The San Francisco Chronicle called Bach: A Strange Beauty "unadorned but profound bliss," and The Washington Post raved, "Dinnerstein's readings may be said to plumb these works' genuine depths . . . poised, elegant, wonderfully played."
Dinnerstein says of her new album, and its title, "Bach and Schubert, to my ears, share a distinctive quality. Their non-vocal music has a powerful narrative, a vocal element. The effect is that of wordless voices singing textless melodies. Bach and Schubert's melodic lines are so fluent, so expressive, and so minutely inflected that they sound as though they might at any moment burst suddenly into speech. They sound like something almost being said."
Simone Dinnerstein has been called "a throwback to such high priestesses of music as Wanda Landowska and Myra Hess," by Slate magazine, and praised by TIME for her "arresting freshness and subtlety." The New York-based pianist gained an international following because of the remarkable success of her recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, which she raised the funds to record. Released in 2007 on Telarc, it ranked No. 1 on the US Billboard Classical Chart in its first week of sales and was named to many "Best of 2007" lists including those of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Her follow-up album, The Berlin Concert, also gained the No. 1 spot on the Chart.
Dinnerstein's performance schedule has since taken her around the world. Recent and upcoming highlight include performances at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Vienna Konzerthaus, Berlin Philharmonie, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and London's Wigmore Hall; at festivals including the Lincoln Center Mostly Mozart Festival, the Aspen, Verbier, and Ravinia Festivals, and the Stuttgart Bach Festival; and concerto performances with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Dresden Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Berlin, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Kristjan Järvi's Absolute Ensemble, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, and the Tokyo Symphony.
Dinnerstein has played concerts throughout the United States for the Piatigorsky Foundation, an organization dedicated to bringing classical music to non-traditional venues. Amongst the places she has played are nursing homes, schools and community centers. Most notably, she gave the first classical music performance in the Louisiana state prison system when she played at the Avoyelles Correctional Center. She also performed at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women, in a concert organized by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra to coincide with her BSO debut.
Dedicated to her community, in 2009 Dinnerstein founded Neighborhood Classics, a series of concerts open to the public hosted by New York City public schools. The series features musicians she has met throughout her career, and raises funds for the schools. Neighborhood Classics began at P.S. 321, the Brooklyn elementary school that Dinnerstein's son attends and where her husband teaches. Artists who have performed on the series include Richard Stoltzman, Maya Beiser, Pablo Ziegler, and many more.
Over the past few years, Dinnerstein has been featured in Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, Classic FM Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, "O" The Oprah Magazine, TIME, Slate, Stern, Cicero, The Sunday (London) Times Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others, and has appeared on radio programs including BBC Radio 3's In Tune, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, NPR's Morning Edition, Public Radio International's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, American Public Media's Performance Today, Minnesota Public Radio, XM Radio's Classical Confidential, as part of the news on SIRIUS Satellite Radio's The Howard Stern Show, and on national television in Germany.
