KGNU’s Sanford Baran interviews pianist Simone Dinnerstein. Dinnerstein speaks about her latest project, The Eye is the First Circle, a multimedia performance combining Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata with her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting, the Fulbright Triptych. The project, inspired by Emerson’s philosophy of perpetual growth and transformation, intertwines music, visual art, and personal themes of identity, memory, and artistic legacy.
Sanford Baran: Today I’m thrilled to welcome the acclaimed pianist, Simone Dinnerstein. Simone has captivated audiences worldwide with her thoughtful interpretations and innovative projects, from her groundbreaking recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations to performances with leading orchestras in unique venues. Her latest release is titled The Eye is the First Circle. There’s a bold multimedia exploration that intertwines Charles Ives complex and groundbreaking Concord Sonata with the Fulbright Triptych, the renowned painting by her father, celebrated artist Simon Dinnerstein. This project combines music, visual art, and philosophical reflections to explore themes of identity, memory, and artistic legacy.
Simone, Welcome.
Simone Dinnerstein: Thanks so much, Sanford. It’s great to be here.
Sanford Baran: Yeah, let’s dive right into your new album, The Eye is the First Circle. It’s a fascinating title drawn from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Can you explain what it means to you and how Emerson’s philosophy shaped your vision for this project?
Simone Dinnerstein: That line is the first line of an essay that Emerson wrote called “Circles”. Emerson was a very loquacious writer. The idea is that all of us are constantly in a state of becoming. Everything about life is transient and about growth and that we continuously, by taking in new information, new experiences, draw an ever expanding circle around our idea of who we are and our consciousness of the world around us.
In this performance piece that I was making, I was using my father’s Fulbright Triptych, which is almost like a Renaissance triptych, but it’s huge. It’s about 14 feet wide. One wing has my father, the other wing has my mother holding me on her lap as an infant. The middle panel, which usually would have been in renaissance art where Jesus was, in this case is my father’s studio.
So it’s a painting that was about my parents’ world in the early 1970s, all the things that mattered to them and created their world. And that world created my world. The images in that painting all influenced who I am as an artist. Charles Ives was very influenced by the work of the Transcendentalist writers, and that inspired him to write his Concord Sonata, where each movement is a depiction through textless music for piano of the writing that so deeply influenced him.
It seems like both Ives and my father and I, in making this piece with their work, were trying to draw a new circle from all of these influences that we had. In Ives’s music, you hear not only the inspiration of the writers, but also the inspiration he drew from all the music that had been part of the fabric of his life. Music from the great classical Western canon, as well as music from American popular culture that surrounded him in New England.
Sanford Baran: You’ve touched on this a bit, but I’d like to explore further. How does your personal story intertwine with the music and visuals? I saw snippets of the live performance on your website, and it’s remarkable. Your playing, combined with projected images, creates an immersive experience. What is it like to perform amidst this audiovisual environment?
Simone Dinnerstein: It was quite a piece to put together. I was very fortunate to work with Laurie Olinder, who’s a fabulous video artist. I very much thought about each part of the music and what each part of the music was saying to me personally. There are parts of the music that I see as color or abstract. There are other parts of the music that seem very specifically about something.
I found elements in the triptych. The triptych is a highly detailed painting. It has my father pinned on the walls of his studio, all of these little postcards of great works of art that were meaningful to him. My mother was teaching early childhood. So there were children’s drawings or teaching children how to write or little quotes that my father would put up that inspired him. Photographs of family, all of the things that you tack up on your bulletin board. His studio is full with all of these things on the walls and all of the tools he was using to create. A copper plate, an etching that he was making. This copper plate is the center of the painting.
So I thought about the music, which is also very fragmented. Ives’s music has lots of texture and lots of polyphony. There are many different voices happening at the same time. I coordinated them with elements of the triptych and worked with Laurie to think, how can we use them? Sometimes Laurie animated them in fantastical ways, like some of the children’s drawings start going crazy and go all over the screen.
I became part of the environment by sitting there with these panels where the images are projected on the stage. It’s a very emotional experience for me to perform this piece because I’m immersing myself in this painting that is so personal to me.
I also manipulate it. I manipulated my parents in the painting. They’re on either side of this studio. I’m with my mother, my father’s all the way on the other side, but on the other side of the studio, art is separating us as well as drawing us together. The Alcotts, the third movement of the Concord Sonata, is a deeply tender, touching movement. I had Laurie take my parents out of their wings. They sit next to each other and next to me. I’m on the stage and my parents as young parents are sitting larger than life. They’re about 16 feet high, watching me perform. There’s something about me being an adult performing with my younger parents sitting next to me. It’s like a ghost story. It’s very emotional doing that.
Sanford Baran: Do you feel that this project resolves anything for you personally, especially considering the familial themes in the triptych? Perhaps it’s more of a bringing together rather than a resolution?
Simone Dinnerstein: I think that making this piece was a very powerful psychological and almost therapeutic process. It certainly brought up a lot of issues that I had never fully thought about before. Also, it was very difficult and meaningful having my parents sitting in the audience watching this. I didn’t let them see anything until it was all finished. That was a big thing. I would say it’s the most creative project I’ve ever done.
Sanford Baran: I’m curious about your parents’ reactions to this project, especially your father. Did seeing his triptych reinterpreted in this way offer him new insights or deepen his connection to the work?
Simone Dinnerstein: The triptych is his most talked about and written about work. In fact, there’s a whole book of essays by many different people about the triptych. It’s called “The Suspension of Time”. The name, the suspension of time, came from something that George Crumb wrote about the triptych.
It’s a work of art that has been interpreted in many different ways. I think that he was very nervous about what I was doing because I refused to talk to him about it and have him be any part of it. Of course I seriously manipulated his painting in the piece.
In fact, there are parts where Laurie distorts them. There’s one part in Emerson where she takes my mother and father and she makes them almost cubist. I’m sure that was hard to watch for him, but luckily he seems to really love the piece. I think that he and my mother see it as also showing just how much I love them, which is true.
There are parts of it that are criticisms or things I’ve struggled with. But most of it is about how much they shaped who I am. And I think, what parent would not want to hear that from their child?
Sanford Baran: In the second movement, Hawthorne, and the fourth, Thoreau, there’s an incorporation of nature sounds. Was this a deliberate decision to enhance the transcendentalist themes? And how did these elements influence the performance?
Simone Dinnerstein: I also thought about incorporating images of nature into the piece, because I think that nature figures large in the works of the transcendentalists. I thought, oh, it’d be so interesting to have the sounds of night. I also thought of each movement as being a different time of day. So Hawthorne was the night, and there’s something nightmarish about it and scary. I thought of the sound of owls hooting and the pond at night, which I’ve always found a little frightening.
At the end of the movement, Hawthorne, I used a lot of images of the children’s drawings combining with the sounds of the music becoming increasingly frantic. The end of Hawthorne is terrifying to play, but it’s also terrifying to listen to it. Everything is rushing and piling on.
Laurie took all these different papers that were in the triptych. They frantically are piling, one paper on top of the other. We had videos of my hands. Live action cameras, five different cameras, and they all start showing my hands from different angles as I’m playing.
It just looks crazy. I thought it would be really great to combine that with the sound of children shrieking in a playground, which I’ve also always found a little bit terrifying. So that movement ends with them shrieking and they continue to shriek after the music ends. Which I just love.
Thoreau, the fourth and final movement, I think of as being the dawn. It starts before I even start playing. We hear the sounds of birds and the birds fade into the fabric of the video and then the music.
Sanford Baran: Experiencing this work live, with its immersive visuals and sounds, seems profoundly different from listening to the recording. What do you hope audiences take away from this project, whether they attend a live performance or listen to the album?
Simone Dinnerstein: I think that the music itself is immersive. If you listen to it without seeing what I did, you’re already getting the sense that I’ve had this almost three dimensional sense of music.
It feels like it’s right there with you, that it’s surrounding you. Because I think that part of it is the very highly polyphonic writing. You hear multiple elements happening at the same time, and sometimes you hear one coming out more than another, like Bach. But in this case, some of it is in one tonality and other is in another tonality.
So it’s even more sharply delineated than hearing Bach. Bach, you have to train your ears to really hear that there are many different lines taking place, but with the Ives, you’ll hear one that’s doing a clown act and the other one is doing Debussy and this clearly sounds like that.
Having these extra audio elements in it of the night sounds and the birds and the children’s voices is nice. I think that we’re not used to hearing classical recordings that have extra sounds in them that are not exactly what you expect. This recording is of a live performance I gave of this piece, so you have that immediacy of the live performance as well.
Sanford Baran: How do you balance honoring the composer’s intent while infusing your own artistic voice? And what do you think Ives would make of this multimedia performance?
Simone Dinnerstein: I have complicated feelings about this question and the whole notion of the composer’s intent. I feel that as an interpreter, I want to have as much information as possible. But ultimately, I think it’s my own interpretation of the musical text that makes me hear how I want to shape something more than thinking about, what did this person want me to do? Even when I work with living composers, I don’t always follow their markings, if the markings don’t illuminate what I hear is in the music.
I think that Ives would probably have found it really interesting to see this multimedia performance. He was somebody who was really interested in cacophony and jarring experiences. From my own angle, I found all of his markings in the music utterly bewildering. To me, they were at odds with me hearing what he’d actually written, the notes that he wrote. I couldn’t hear them if I did them with the markings that he made. So finally, I erased every single marking in the music and all I had left were the notes. I didn’t even have a single dynamic marking, not a single articulation or tempo, any of that. Then I felt so much better. To me it opened up the music in a completely new way. I felt that I was able to really look at the music and respond to what I was hearing there.
Sanford Baran: Looking at classical music in 2024, what excites you most about the evolving landscape and its changing audiences?
Simone Dinnerstein: Oh, that’s a good question. I feel like we’re getting much freer in how we program concerts, and what we play, and not feeling as tied to a stiff tradition where a recital program has to happen in chronological order, or even that you need to have complete works. It’s possible to mix and match. We’ve all become curators of our own playlists when we’re listening to music. It has really affected how we listen to music in concerts. So on the one hand, you could say that’s made people’s attention spans shorter, but on the other hand, you could say it’s also made us more experimental in how we listen and how we mix up music that we like.
Personally, I feel like I’m taking more risks and trying to play different types of music or play music in contexts that I wouldn’t have thought of beforehand. And thinking also about other elements that help a concert experience such as lighting or making it a more casual experience where it’s just a woman in a gown on the stage and everybody else casually sitting in the audience. I like breaking up those boundaries.
Sanford Baran: Simone, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Congratulations on this extraordinary project and the release of your new album. When I air this interview on The Present Edge, I’ll play the entire Concord Sonata so our listeners can fully experience it.
Simone Dinnerstein: Fantastic. Thanks for doing that with us, I hope that the audience likes it.
Sanford Baran: Thank you again for joining me. It’s been a true pleasure to speak with you. This is Sanford Baran for KGNU.
