Oct 18: Simone Dinnerstein Releases New Album The Eye is the First Circle - Charles Ives' Concord Sonata
Photo of Simone Dinnerstein by Tanya Braganti available in high resolution at: https://jensen-artists.squarespace.com/artists-profiles/simone-dinnerstein
Simone Dinnerstein Announces New Album The Eye is the First Circle
Featuring Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata
Coinciding with the Composer’s 150th Birthday
Release Date on Supertrain Records: October 18, 2024
Listen to Simone’s NPR Interview About the Live Production of The Eye is the First Circle
CDs and press downloads available upon request.
www.simonedinnerstein.com | www.eyeisthefirstcircle.com | www.supertrainrecords.com
GRAMMY®-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The Washington Post as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity,” will release her next album, The Eye is the First Circle featuring iconic American composer Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, on October 18, 2024 via Supertrain Records – timed to coincide with Ives’ 150th birthday on October 20. The new album is a live recording of the premiere of Dinnerstein’s multimedia production of the same title, at the Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University, New Jersey on October 17, 2021.
The recording is Dinnerstein's last to be released with her longtime recording partner, GRAMMY-winning producer Adam Abeshouse, who also produced her previous thirteen albums. She says, “The Eye is the First Circle was a deeply personal project for me, and it was very meaningful to have Adam there. It is even more meaningful that this marks our last album together.”
Dinnerstein has long been drawn to the music of Charles Ives. “There is a type of wild struggle in his music between the weighty influences of the past and the Americana of his upbringing and his quest for developing his own musical language,” she says. “The music seems to vacillate between a kind of haunting memory of beauty and an extremely dissonant and forward-looking anticipation of the future. It’s deeply human, incorporating tragedy and comedy, a striving for the spiritual and an embrace of popular culture. In our present day, when every one of us is able at the drop of the hat to curate the most esoteric of playlists, both literally and metaphorically, his music resonates deeply.”
With her production The Eye is the First Circle, Simone Dinnerstein ventured into bold interdisciplinary artistic territory in collaboration with projection designer Laurie Olinder and lighting designer Davison Scandrett. Conceived and directed by Dinnerstein, the dynamic production deconstructs and collages elements from two iconic works of art – Simone’s father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata – and also incorporates ambient sounds of children playing, night sounds from the pond, and birdsong.
In the live, multimedia performance, Simon Dinnerstein’s 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 was inspired in part by a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Circles: “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.”
Dinnerestein explains the work further, writing in the liner notes for this album:
“We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming – a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being. Ives’ music teems with invention, with the music that was all around him – art music and popular music – from which he, in turn, created his own distinctive and changing voice. . . This artistic project was a way in which I could ponder the process we’ve all been through – the accretion of experiences and influences that brought me to the place I was. It was an attempt to do what Emerson argued that we all want to do: to draw a new circle.”
In addition to the premiere at Montclair State University presented and commissioned by PEAK Performances, Dinnerstein has performed The Eye is the First Circle at the Folly Theater in Kansas City presented by the Harriman Jewell Series and at the Gogue Performing Arts Center at Auburn University.
About Simone Dinnerstein:
American pianist Simone Dinnerstein has a distinctive musical voice. 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 and were recorded by Grammy Award-winning producer Adam Abeshouse. 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.
In recent years, Dinnerstein has created projects that express her broad musical interests. In addition to The Eye is the First Circle, 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 and the Cleveland Orchestra. 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.
Track List:
Simone Dinnerstein: The Eye is the First Circle
Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata
Simone Dinnerstein, piano
Supertrain Records | Release Date: October 18, 2024
Charles Ives: Concord Sonata
1. "Emerson" (after Ralph Waldo Emerson) [16:19]
2. "Hawthorne" (after Nathaniel Hawthorne) [12:21]
3. "The Alcotts" (after Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott) [5:33]
4. "Thoreau" (after Henry David Thoreau) [11:31]
Produced and engineered by Adam Abeshouse
Edited, mixed and mastered by Adam Abeshouse
Sequencing by Matthew Agoglia
Photos by Maria Baranova
Yamaha CFX
Piano Technician: Shane Hoshino
The Eye is the First Circle is a multimedia work commissioned by PEAK Performances at Montclair State University. This recording is the audio from the premiere at the Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University, New Jersey on October 17, 2021.