naïve Releases First Simone Dinnerstein Album

Cover of the album being discussed, showing members of the Baroklyn ensemble 

Unless my search engine is deceiving me, I have not written about the naïve album label since 2016, when its Douce France release of vocalist Anne Sofie Von Otter was a candidate for the Best Classical Solo Vocal Album in that year’s GRAMMY nominations. That said, I can now report that, early next month, the label will release its first album of performances by American pianist Simone Dinnerstein. She leads her own Baroklyn ensemble on an album entitled Hourglass.

The recording is divided roughly evenly by two compositions for piano and orchestra by Philip Glass. The first of these is based on music that Glass extracted from the film score he composed for Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours. Michael Riesman took that music and arranged it into a three-movement piano concerto with Dinnerstein as the soloist. She then takes the solo part in the second (and last) Glass composition on the album, the “Tirol Concerto,” scored for piano and orchestra.

Unless I am mistaken, I first became aware of Glass in 1970 when the Philip Glass Ensemble performed a full-length (three compositions … I think) recital at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At that time the reactions tended to be on the negative side, some almost violently so; but I found relief in a listening experience that did not require some of the fundamentals of higher mathematics found in the so-called twelve-tone genre. Since that time, there have been any number of jokes about Glass’ approach to repetitive structures spanning significant durations; but, for the most part, I tended to come away from any Glass listening experience feeling refreshed.

That is the way I felt when I listened to Hourglass for the first time. Over the course of further listening, I have been particularly interested in the subtle approaches that Glass takes to instrumentation. The structures are as repetitive as ever, but the sonorities lead the attentive listener along a path of discoveries. The most interesting of those discoveries is the second composition on the album, “Tirol Concerto.” Glass composed it in 2000, by which time most listeners had cultivated an appreciation for his rhetoric. Nevertheless, it was not performed until November of 2023 with Dinnerstein as the concerto soloist; and I must confess that I have no idea why attentive listeners had to wait so long!

Perhaps I “adjusted” as quickly as I did because I began to accumulate a generous number of Glass piano albums; but the real reason may be that I quickly warmed up to listening to performances by Frank Zappa after I heard him say, “It’s all music!”