Simone Dinnerstein, pianist

Mar 5

Written By Sforzato Developer 2

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“lean, knowing, and unpretentious elegance”

— The New Yorker

“an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity”

— The Washington Post

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. The New York Times described her as “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.” The Washington Post has called her “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity.”

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. Highlights of the 2026-27 season include the premiere of Brad Mehldau’s Suite for Piano at Boston’s Symphony Hall, which was commissioned for Simone by the Terezin Foundation, a tour with the Juilliard String Quartet and recitals at the Oregon Bach Festival and Toronto’s Koerner Hall. She will collaborate with the string orchestra A Far Cry, to perform and record the arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that they have made together. In October she will receive the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Memorial Award from Washington Performing Arts.

Simone Dinnerstein is a prolific recording artist. Her first fourteen albums were recorded with the late Adam Abeshouse, GRAMMY Award-winner and producer extraordinaire. These albums feature repertoire ranging from Couperin to Glass. From 2020 to 2022, she released a trilogy of albums recorded at her home in Brooklyn during the pandemic. A Character of Quiet (Orange Mountain Music, 2020), featuring the music of Philip Glass and Schubert, was described by NPR as, “music that speaks to a sense of the world slowing down,” and by The New Yorker as, “a reminder that quiet can contain multitudes.” Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic (Supertrain Records, 2021), surpassed two million streams on Apple Music and was nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo. The final installment in the trilogy, Undersong, was released in January 2022 on Orange Mountain Music.

Since 2025, Simone has worked with Adam’s friend and colleague, producer Silas Brown. In 2025 she recorded Complicité (Supertrain Records, 2025) with Silas, her first all-Bach album in over ten years. It features Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano and Peggy Pearson, oboe d’amore, along with the string ensemble Dinnerstein founded and directs, Baroklyn (a portmanteau of Baroque and Brooklyn, her home New York borough). The album also includes composer Philip Lasser’s continuo realizations and recomposition of Bach’s Air on the G String. Complicité reached over one million streams on Apple Music in its first two weeks after release.
In Hourglass, her most recent album and label debut with Naïve, Simone leads Baroklyn in Philip Glass’s Tirol Concerto and Suite from The Hours. Hourglass received a prestigious Diapason D’Or from the French music magazine Diapason, which called it “a major new addition to the Glass discography.” The New York Times wrote that the album offered “something different from mechanical precision… At the music’s most fervid, her touch remains warmly sensual, and her trills, voluptuous. Minutes don’t tick by. They throb, full of regretful longing.”
In recent years, Dinnerstein has created projects that express her broad musical interests. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. In 2024, she released The Eye Is the First Circle on Supertrain Records, coinciding with Ives’ 150th birthday. She performed 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. She also premiered Philip Lasser’s The Circle and the Child, which he composed for her, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and recorded it for Sony Classical.
In New York, she regularly curates and performs on an innovative Bach series at the Miller Theatre, and she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Kaufman Music Center, where she mentored student musicians and performed Philip Glass’s The Hours and Tirol piano concerto with Baroklyn. Simone Dinnerstein is committed to giving concerts in non-traditional venues and to audiences who don’t often hear classical music. For many years, she played concerts throughout the United States for the Piatigorsky Foundation, an organization dedicated to the widespread dissemination of classical music. It was for the Piatigorsky Foundation that she gave the first piano recital in the Louisiana state prison system at the Avoyelles Correctional Center. She has also performed at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in a concert organized by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. From 2009-2020, Dinnerstein produced Neighborhood Classics, a concert series open to the public and hosted by New York City Public Schools to raise funds for their music education programs. She also created a program called Bachpacking during which she brought a digital keyboard to elementary school classrooms, helping young children get close to the music she loves.
She is a proud alumna of Philadelphia’s Astral Artists, which supported young performers. She has served on the jury of the Leeds International Piano Competition, the Bach Competition Leipzig, the ARD International Music Competition, the Young Concert Artists Auditions, and the Hilton Head International Piano Competition. Dinnerstein is on the piano faculty of the Mannes School of Music and is a guest host of WQXR’s Young Artists Showcase.
Simone Dinnerstein counts herself fortunate to have studied with three unique artists: Solomon Mikowsky, Maria Curcio, and Peter Serkin, very different musicians who shared the belief that playing the piano is a means to something greater. In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative.