The American pianist Simone Dinnerstein made her mark on the concert scene with her peerless readings of the music of J.S. Bach, and the Goldberg Variations in particular.
But her career has also brought attention to the music of a living composer, Philip Lasser, a Juilliard professor whose Twelve Variations on a Chorale by J.S. Bach was featured on Dinnerstein’s recording of a 2007 recital in Berlin.
Dinnerstein met Lasser after recording his Cello Sonata with the fine American cellist Zuill Bailey.
“He gave me the score to the ‘Variations,’ and it took me a little while to actually get to it, but when I did, I just absolutely fell in love with it,” she said earlier this month from her home in Brooklyn. “I think I’ve performed it well over 100 times, and I’ve recorded it. It’s a great piece.
“Interestingly, he has sold a lot of copies of it. Usually with contemporary music, the scores don’t really sell. He’s had to have it reprinted,” she said.
This Friday, Dinnerstein will open the 32nd annual Festival Miami at the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus with a performance of another work by Lasser, his piano concerto The Circle and the Child, in its Florida premiere. She’ll be accompanied by UM’s Frost Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Thomas Sleeper.
Sleeper, a well-regarded composer himself, also has programmed two other American works: Alan Hovhaness’s environment-oriented 1970 tone poem And God Created Great Whales, and Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 5 (Op. 43, Sinfonia Sacra), composed in 1955.
Festival Miami will run through Nov. 7 at UM’s Gusman Hall, and feature more than 20 performances in a variety of genres, including classical, pop, Broadway and jazz. Among the classical performers will be the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet (Oct. 25), chamber musicians Richard Todd, Joel Smirnoff and Christopher O’Riley in music of Brahms and Messiaen (Oct. 28), and the classical/hip-hop duo Black Violin (Nov. 1). Pop songwriter Ben Folds will also solo in his own piano concerto with UM’s Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra on Oct. 30.
Dinnerstein, who burst onto the classical scene in 2005 with a Carnegie Hall debut for which she rented the hall herself, has become since then one of the most popular pianists in the genre. She’s released five albums of music by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Ravel and Lasser, and collaborated with singer-songwriter Tift Merritt on an album called Night in 2013.
The daughter of a painter and an educator, Dinnerstein, 43, studied with Maria Curcio and Solomon Mikowsky, and then with Peter Serkin at the Juilliard School. A devoted resident of Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, she founded in 2009 a concert series in New York City public schools — including her elementary alma mater, P.S. 321, where her husband, Jeremy Greensmith, teaches, and where her now 13-year-old son Adrian was a student — called Neighborhood Classics that features many of Dinnerstein’s musical colleagues, and which serves as a fundraiser for the schools.
Lasser’s concerto, which had its world premiere in Atlanta in 2013, is a three-movement work whose middle section slow movement is constructed around a Bach chorale, Ihr Gestirn, ihr höhlen Lufte (You bright stars, you vaulted sky), which Bach arranged from a tune by Johann Franck. The first movement has a flavor of French impressionism, and in the finale, the pianist plays a steadily moving, rolling C major theme that continues serenely on while the orchestra does something quite different.
Although it’s in three movements, it’s not a traditional concerto, Dinnerstein said.
“The form is very different than most piano concertos, and the relationship between the piano and the orchestra is very different. This is not a virtuosic vehicle, it’s not the pianist playing versus the orchestra. There’s a real sense of unity between the piano and the orchestra,” she said. “The harmonies are very subtle, and in the last movement in particular, the pianist is playing all white keys for the whole piece, and the orchestra is playing pretty much different combinations of black keys, and almost trying to throw the pianist off course. The pianist finally succeeds in bringing the orchestra with her at the end.
“I think people find this piece to be extremely moving,” Dinnerstein said. “I’ve now performed it quite a few times, I’ve got the recording out now [Broadway-Lafayette, released in February], and I’ve received quite a bit of fan mail about it. Also, it’s been played a tremendous amount on the radio, and I think that’s very interesting because a lot radio stations tend to shy away from playing new (classical) music. But whenever I’ve spoken with the different radio programmers, they’ve all been really excited about the piece and have had great response from people on it.”
The concerto was written for, and is dedicated to, Dinnerstein, who said she had become close friends with Lasser after the Variations, and “decided I would really love for him to write a piano concerto for me.”
He began work on it about six years ago, and told her he would use a Bach chorale as a unifying element.
“We would meet up periodically while he was writing it and would show me what he had written. And I was just so excited about it. I really couldn’t be happier with how it came out; it’s almost like a personal letter that he wrote to me. It’s so much written for me, and I find that all of the colors and the textures and the pianism of it, and the Bachian quality to it, is very much about our shared interests in types of music and a very strong sensitivity to my sound and my aesthetic,” she said.
For his part, Lasser is just as enthusiastic about Dinnerstein’s work.
“Simone is a rare poet; she’s a poet at the piano. Her sound, both in Bach and for sure in my music … I find a depth in the sound and color that I don’t find in very many pianists,” he said. “When I hear her play Bach, I feel that I’m not hearing an interpreter playing Bach. Of course, purists are going to say, ‘Well, she’s playing it at the piano,’ but the irony to me is that it’s just Bach, whether it’s played on a piano or a harpsichord or whatever, and when she plays it, there’s no interpretational sheen on it.”
The late great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, known for his remarkable Bach performances, nevertheless is playing with an interpretational “varnish,” Lasser said. Not so with Dinnerstein.
“When you hear her, it’s almost as if she just presents the notes in a way that is beautiful, meaningful, correct and elegant, and just so,” he said, speaking from his home in New York. “That’s rare, and that’s what I find so beautiful about the way she plays, and I find it an honor that she applies her intuition to my music.”
Like Dinnerstein, Lasser, 52, is a native of New York City, and as a teenager studied at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, France, where he attended some of the last appearances by its legendary pedagogue and director Nadia Boulanger, who died in 1979.
“She did do several master classes, which were completely life-changing for me — I was 15 at the time — finally finding someone who was deeply spiritual about the understanding of music. Instead of technical issues, you learned harmony, you learned what goes on through analysis of music, but not for technical reasons, for the joy and love of hearing,” Lasser said, adding that Boulanger explained not just how sonority itself affects how we hear where we are in a given key or harmonic structure, but that the whole process of music “should be a joy. It is a joy. She imparted that even in the brief interaction I had with her.”
Lasser went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Harvard, a master’s at Columbia and a doctorate at Juilliard, where he studied with composer David Diamond. He’s been on the Juilliard faculty since 1994, and is director of the European American Music Alliance, which trains performers, conductors and composers according to Boulanger’s principles.
Lasser describes his concerto, which Dinnerstein will bring to Germany early next year with conductor Kristjan Järvi and the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, as “a work that is both cyclic in nature and constantly deals with and manipulates memory.”
The central actor in all this is the figure of the child, whom Lasser sees as a citizen of a state of nature rather than a pure being tragically corrupted.
“The notion of the child is, in a sense, the concept of ultimately we’re seeking innocent knowledge, not diabolical knowledge … That innocence is the true beauty of life. We say that children are born innocent, but children are not innocent necessarily in the Hallmark way, but they are open,” he said. “And so for me the child reflects all the enormous fears and anxieties we all live with on a day-to-day basis, and conversely, can find ways to find great solace and beauty in life despite the fact that it is fraught with unpredictable things, painful things and powerful things.”
Lasser said that can be heard most clearly in the second movement, with its repeated coming back to the Bach chorale “as a voice of conscience” between the phrases of which the orchestra can be heard depicting the struggle between the innocence of a child exploring the world and the “inner anxieties and fears that go along with that,” he said. “As far as the ultimate meaning and message of the title, I wanted a title that was extremely evocative but not descriptive, so that an audience member, someone listening to the piece, cannot just be guided by me to a particular story, but hopefully can be invited to provide his or her own story.”
And in all this, Bach is the ultimate touchstone in that he is the first composer Lasser knows of to have expressed circularity, in which “music travels from a beginning back to a beginning.”
“It’s a very powerful metaphor, that you should be, when you are composing, traveling along a circle, not along a line … you should be tailoring it so that it brings you inevitably back to a beginning, whether it’s the beginning of a movement, or of a section,” he said. “These constant loops are the way we can create structure in time … When you return to something, you can see how you’ve grown, how you’ve matured, how you’ve evolved.
“And when we play Bach, whether it’s a short piece or a long piece, he’s a master of making us travel along a circle,” Lasser said. “That was one of the fundamental things I learned from him, and I try to incorporate in my pieces, and certainly in the concerto.”
Dinnerstein finds echoes of Bach in another work she’s performing this season, the First Concerto (in D minor, Op. 15) of Johannes Brahms. She played it earlier this month in Maryland, and will play it with the Berkshire Symphony in Massachusetts later this month and the Valdosta Symphony in Georgia early in November.
“I love that concerto. I have been playing it for a number of years now, but I feel like I just keep getting to understand more about it the more I play it,” she said. “I find the orchestration just so daring. He makes such interesting choices in how he balances the piano and the orchestra. I feel like it’s often a piece that’s misunderstood; it’s not a bombastic piece, it’s really a chamber music work.”
She points to its “huge, massive” structure and its rhythmic variety as other elements that make it such a compelling piece.
“The sense of the meter and of the pulse is constantly changing, and I really like that. I think it’s really influenced by Bach,” she said.
In the middle of a full schedule of recitals that extends through May, Dinnerstein will head into the studio in January for her next recording, which she can’t talk about yet except to say that it has to do with Cuba.
“I think it’s going to be really awesome,” she said. “I wish I could say more about it.”
Ultimately, the worlds of Bach and contemporary music like The Circle and the Child come together when they address permanent human concerns, Lasser said.
“When the message is about humanity, that never gets old and stale,” he said. “All of us are born, we learn, we live, and we die … (Bach’s) music is fresh because he’s talking about what we’re talking about.
“If it were about powdered wigs, it would feel stale and dated. It’s not about powdered wigs.”
Festival Miami opens at 8 p.m. Friday at Gusman Hall with Simone Dinnerstein and the Frost Symphony Orchestra. The festival runs through Nov. 7. Tickets start at $15; more information about the festival is available at www.festivalmiami.com or by calling 305-284-4940.