Oct. 23-25: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein Performs Three Concerts in West Hartford, CT and Worcester, MA
Photo of Simone Dinnerstein and Baroklyn by Grayson Dantzic available in high resolution here.
GRAMMY®-Nominated Pianist Simone Dinnerstein
Performs Three Concerts in West Hartford, CT and Worcester, MA
October 23-25, 2025
Performing Music from New Bach Album Complicité
Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Library of Congress’s Concert Series
Thursday, October 23, 2025 at 7:30pm
Simone Dinnerstein and Baroklyn: Music from New Album Complicité
with CONCORA at the University of Hartford
Presented by the Richard P. Garmany Concert Series
Tickets & Information
Friday, October 24, 2025 at 8pm
Simone Dinnerstein and Baroklyn: Music from New Album Complicité
with Mezzo-Soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano & CONCORA at Mechanics Hall
Presented by Music Worcester as part of BACHtoberfest 2025
Tickets & Information
Saturday, October 25, 2025 at 8pm
Simone Dinnerstein and Cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach
Bach’s Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord and Inventions and Sinfonias at Mechanics Hall
Presented by Music Worcester as part of BACHtoberfest 2025
Tickets & Information
Complicité is Out Now on Supertrain Records
Listen to Simone Dinnerstein on NPR’s Morning Edition
Simone Dinnerstein: www.simonedinnerstein.com
Hartford, CT; Worcester, MA – GRAMMY®-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein – who is described by The Washington Post as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity” – will give three performances centered around the music of J.S. Bach on October 23, 24, and 25, 2025, presented by the Richard P. Garmany Concert Series at the University of Hartford (October 23) and by Music Worcester as part of BACHtoberfest 2025 (October 24 and 25).
On Thursday, October 23, 2025 at 7:30pm, Dinnerstein performs with Baroklyn – the string ensemble she founded and directs – in music from their new Bach album, Complicité, plus Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in E Major, BWV 1060. The concert will also feature CONCORA (Connecticut Choral Artists). The performance, presented by the Garmany Concert Series, will take place in Millard Auditorium at the University of Hartford (200 Bloomfield Ave., Hartford, CT). They will repeat the program as part of Music Worcester’s BACHtoberfest on Friday, October 24, 2025 at 8pm at Mechanics Hall (321 Main St., Worcester, MA). As part of both programs, Dinnerstein will be making her conducting debut, conducting Cantata BWV 9 and movements from Cantatas 99, 22, and 182 with CONCORA and Baroklyn.
With her longtime friend and musical colleague, cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach, Dinnerstein will also perform a second concert as part of Music Worcester’s BACHtoberfest at Mechanics Hall on Saturday, October 25, 2025 at 8pm. The program features Bach’s Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord and his Inventions and Sinfonias.
Simone Dinnerstein is well known for her distinctive musical voice and for her expressive performances of music by J.S. Bach. 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.”
Her new album with Baroklyn, Complicité, includes Dinnerstein and Baroklyn’s arrangement of Bach’s chorale Herr Gott, nun schleuß den Himmel auf, BWV 617; Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in E Major, BWV 1053; J.S. Bach: Der Leib war in der Erden, BWV 161 (arr. Simone Dinnerstein and Baroklyn); Bach’s Cantata 170, Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust with continuo realization by Philip Lasser, featuring mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano; and In the Air, Lasser’s recomposition of Bach’s Air on the G String.
The deeply felt recording has been warmly received by listeners – Complicité has already been streamed over 1 million times. Gramophone describes Dinnerstein’s performance as “full of life, engagement and detail.” Of the new album, Textura writes: “Not only are the performances terrific, the music impresses for being more than faithful replications of existing scores but instead arresting re-imaginings that take Bach's pieces into dynamic new realms.” Read the album press release here and listen here.
Dinnerstein says of her group Baroklyn, “Baroklyn is a group of string players which I lead from the piano. We’re a community that shares the artistic vision that is most important to me, that music should be creative and new. Rehearsal is important to us, and I’ve been influenced by theater practice in which we listen to each other and pass musical ideas and phrases within the group. We rehearse and perform in a semi-circle around the piano and I rearrange parts to emphasize lines, voices and imitative qualities to create a sense of dialogue.” The ensemble’s name is a portmanteau of Baroque and Brooklyn, Dinnerstein’s home borough.
Coinciding with the album’s release, Dinnerstein spoke with NPR’s Morning Edition about the project, as well as about her experience with performance anxiety and the way that playing with the sheet music on an iPad has resolved this for her. Of her work with Baroklyn, she said, “It's like a sharing circle, and you hear everybody's individuality, their individual sound as it gets passed around.” Listen to the NPR interview here.
Simone Dinnerstein and Alexis Pia Gerlach are not only musical collaborators but also dear friends. “Alexis and I have been playing chamber music together since our tweens as students at the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division,” says Dinnerstein. “Playing with her feels like breathing.” For their October 25 concert, they will perform a program that includes Bach’s Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord, BWV 1027-1029; Inventions, BWV 772-786, and Sinfonias, BWV 787-801.
Dinnerstein recorded an album of Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias in 2014 for Sony Classical. BBC Music Magazine described Dinnerstein’s performance on the album as: “stylish, crisply articulated.” She says, “The first keyboard pieces of Bach that I remember hearing were his Inventions, when I was nine years old. The music seemed impossibly expressive and virtuosic at the time, and wholly beyond my abilities. Here were two continuous and independent voices, neither of which was subservient to the other. Until then I had thought of music as melody and accompaniment. Instrumental training is as much a training in how to listen as in how to play. In the text that accompanies the Inventions, Bach calls them ‘an honest guide.’ His Inventions and Sinfonias are marvels in demonstrating just how potent counterpoint is as an aid to expression, and how powerful a cantabile voice can be when surrounded by contradiction and elaboration. These small masterpieces have snippets of dances in them, laments and celebrations, simplicity and complexity.”
Simone Dinnerstein served as Music Worcester's first Artist-In-Residence during its 2018-2019 season. During her residency she performed at beloved Worcester music venues including Mechanics Hall, The Hanover Theatre, and Tuckerman Hall as both a soloist and ensemble leader with groups including Pam Tanowitz Dance, A Far Cry, and The Havana Lyceum Orchestra. Additionally, she brought her "Bach-Packing" program to several of Worcester's public elementary schools throughout the season to work directly with students in the classroom. She was awarded the Key To The City by Worcester mayor Joe Petty in May of 2019 following the completion of her Residency with Music Worcester.
More about Simone Dinnerstein: 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 fifteen albums, all of which have topped the Billboard classical charts. Her first fourteen albums were recorded with 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. Her most recent recording Complicité (Supertrain Records, 2025), is her first all-Bach album in over ten years and features Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano and Peggy Pearson, oboe d’amore along with the string ensemble Simone founded and directs, Baroklyn. Recorded with producer Silas Brown, the album also includes composer Philip Lasser’s continuo realizations and recomposition of Bach’s Air on the G String.
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. 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.
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.
For more information, please visit www.simonedinnerstein.com.