Feb. 3: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein in The Eye is The First Circle Makes her Harriman-Jewell Series Debut
Photo by Maria Baranova available in high resolution at: www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/simone-dinnerstein
Simone Dinnerstein in The Eye is The First Circle
Makes her Harriman-Jewell Series Debut
Saturday, February 3, 2024 at 7 pm
Folly Theater | 300 West 12th Street | Kansas City, MO
Tickets & Information
Excerpts from The Eye is the First Circle: Watch Now
Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered: Listen Now
Kansas City, MO – GRAMMY-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The New Yorker as an artist of “lean, knowing, and unpretentious elegance,” is presented by the Harriman-Jewell Series in the multimedia production that she performs, conceived, and directs – The Eye is the First Circle – on February 3, 2024 at the Folly Theater (300 West 12th Street). This performance of The Eye is the First Circle will mark Dinnerstein’s Harriman-Jewell Series debut.
With The Eye Is the First Circle, which was premiered at Montclair State University in October 2021, Simone Dinnerstein ventures into bold interdisciplinary artistic territory in collaboration with projection designer Laurie Olinder and lighting designer Davison Scandrett. Conceived and directed by Dinnerstein, this dynamic production deconstructs and collages elements from two iconic works of art – her father Simon Dinnerstein’s Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord).
The Fulbright Triptych places a family portrait (including an infant Simone) within the tradition of Medieval altar paintings, against a wall teeming with art historical references, and the Concord Sonata expresses the imaginative and natural world of the Transcendentalists through an ecstatic and fractured musical lens. Olinder pulls visuals including animated elements of the painting and real-time video to all points of the stage, and Scandrett’s lighting gives them breathtaking theatricality.
Dinnerstein’s searching performance sits within this disorientingly immersive visual space. The piece asks: How do our origin stories mold us? How can a sense of self come from the musical and visual fragments we remember from childhood? The Eye Is the First Circle shows us what it is to draw a new circle around the one we stand in, at the edge of what we can see.
Dinnerstein says, “The Eye is the First Circle is a very personal piece that, at its core, explores how my family’s world shaped my relationship to art. I devised it using my father Simon Dinnerstein’s Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. My intellectual, emotional and artistic response to each work, and to the connections I saw between them, is what formed the larger circle I drew. . . While creating this production, I discovered that I had an aptitude for visual composition and for directing. It was as if I discovered a sixth sense that I had never used before, and I felt the joy of generating an artistic experience that expanded beyond music, the area where I am most used to expressing myself. When I began, I did not know what the end point would be. As Emerson wrote, ‘The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.’”
About Simone Dinnerstein: American pianist Simone Dinnerstein has a distinctive musical voice. The Washington Post has called her “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity.” She first came to wider public attention in 2007 through her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, reflecting an aesthetic that was both deeply rooted in the score and profoundly idiosyncratic. She is, wrote The New York Times, “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.”
Dinnerstein has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai. She has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Seoul Arts Center and Sydney Opera House. She has made thirteen albums, all of which topped the Billboard charts. During the pandemic she recorded three albums which form a trilogy: A Character of Quiet, An American Mosaic, and Undersong. An American Mosaic was nominated for a Grammy.
The Eye Is the First Circle is one of the projects Dinnerstein has created in recent years that express her broad musical interests. In addition, she premiered Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Following her recording Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the U.S. for the first time, performing eleven concerts. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera. Dinnerstein has also created her own ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs. The Washington Post comments, “it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative.
About the Harriman-Jewell Series: More than 1,000 performances have come to Kansas City by way of the Harriman-Jewell Series, including 25 American recital debuts by prominent artists. With the addition of our free Educational Events that allow interaction with musicians and dancers, and our free Discovery Concerts that eliminate the barrier of cost, the Harriman-Jewell Series offers even more life-enriching opportunities for our community's youth and lifelong learners. Since the inception of the Harriman-Jewell Series, we have sought to bring the best of the performing arts to Kansas City, and to bring them to local audiences first. We continue to seek new voices and emerging artists alongside artists and ensembles who are leaders in their craft. Artistic programming follows our core tenets - Quality, Variety, Diversity, and Discovery.
For Calendar Editors:
Description: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The Washington Post as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity,” is presented by the Harriman-Jewell Series in The Eye is the First Circle. A multimedia production conceived, directed, and performed by Dinnerstein in collaboration with projection designer Laurie Olinder and lighting designer Davison Scandrett, this production highlights elements from two iconic works of art: Dinnerstein’s father Simon Dinnerstein’s Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2. Dinnerstein describes the production as “a very personal piece that, at its core, explores how my family’s world shaped my relationship to art.”
Short Description: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, who is described as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity,” (The Washington Post) is presented by the Harriman-Jewell Series in her multimedia production The Eye is the First Circle, in collaboration with projection designer Laurie Olinder and lighting designer Davison Scandrett.
Concert details:
Who: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein
Presented by Harriman-Jewell Series
What: A performance of multimedia production, The Eye is the First Circle
When: Saturday, February 3, 2024 at 7:30pm
Where: Folly Theater, 300 West 12th Street, Kansas City, MO, 64105
Tickets and information: www.hjseries.org/events/2324simone-dinnerstein