Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Simone Dinnerstein’s Streamed Columbia Concert

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, her camera crew, and the Hudson skyline as “backdrop” for her Live from Columbia recital (screen shot from the YouTube video)

Yesterday afternoon what is probably pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s final performance of the year was streamed by YouTube as part of the Live from Columbia concert series entitled Pop-Ups in the Lantern, hosted by Columbia University in New York. The venue is part of the university’s Manhattanville campus; and the Lantern is a penthouse space that affords a dazzling view, looking west towards Riverside Church and Grant’s Tomb. The YouTube video has now been stored and is available for subsequent viewing. The video was a prerecording of a live performance, including shots from one camera showing two other members of the crew positioning for subsequent shots.

The program began with the second of Philip Glass’ études followed by the opening Molto moderato movement from Franz Schubert’s final piano sonata, D. 960 in B-flat major. Both of these selections can be found on Dinnerstein’s latest album, A Character of Quiet; and, in fact, they appear consecutively on the third and fourth tracks. Indeed, this video account of Dinnerstein’s performance makes a convincing case that the Glass étude serves as an overture for the Schubert sonata movement.

Perhaps the strongest support for that case can be found in the wide scope of dynamic levels one encounters in Dinnerstein’s execution of both pieces. This is not just a matter of journeys through soft, loud, and levels between the extremes. The Glass étude is distinguished by the interplay of atomic motifs distributed across the length of the keyboard. Each of those motifs has its own journey through changes in dynamic level; and, because the motifs often overlap, Dinnerstein is obliged to maintain multiple dynamic levels simultaneously (or at least give the impression of doing so). That laying of multiple dynamic levels then also emerges in her execution of the Schubert movement, often with shifts in level that are as sharply marked as those encountered in the Glass étude.

The image capture of these multilayered qualities makes a strong case for the video providing a far richer experience than one can encounter from an audio-only source. Furthermore, through the meticulously conceived camera work, the attentive viewer can learn much more about how Dinnerstein approached both of these pieces at the keyboard. Indeed, one would be much more informed by this video than if one had simply been sitting in the audience when she played these selections in recital.

When I encountered A Character of Quiet and wrote about it, I was more than a little skeptical of the conjunction of Glass and Schubert, not to mention the significance of the stanza by William Wordsworth from which the album title was taken. The fact is that all recordings tend to “decompose” the listening experience into “tracks,” often undermining a larger-scale logic that connects those tracks. Dinnerstein’s video, on the other hand, explores a perspective on composition that goes beyond what marks have been imprinted on which sheets of paper. The visual element strengthens the “unification” of individual tracks, resulting is a single experience of time passing for somewhat more than half an hour; and, with the skyline on the east bank of the Hudson River as a “backdrop,” that experience could not have been more engaging and absorbing. (It is also worth noting that the performance took place in late afternoon, allowing the onset of twilight to be added to the overall mix.)

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