Pianist Simone Dinnerstein

Soloist with the Jacksonville Symphony in

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major 

Conducted by Music Director Courtney Lewis

 
Photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco available in high resolution at: https://www.jensenartists.com/simone-dinnerstein  

Friday and Saturday May 20-21, 2022 at 7:30pm 
Jacoby Symphony Hall
300 Water Street, Suite 200 | Jacksonville, FL 

Tickets (In-Person)
www.jaxsymphony.org/event/mozart-radiance/

Livestream (Free):
https://youtu.be/8SI9vBFA4cM

“an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity”
– The Washington Post

Simone Dinnerstein: www.simonedinnerstein.com

Jacksonville, FL – On Friday, May 20, 2022 and Saturday May 21, 2022, pianist Simone Dinnerstein will be the featured piano soloist with the Jacksonville Symphony led by Music Director and Haskell Endowed Chair, Courtney Lewis, at Jacoby Symphony Hall (300 Water Street, Suite 200).

For these two evening concerts, Dinnerstein will perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. Also included on the program are Thomas Adès’ Dawn and Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite.

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488 holds particular significance for Dinnerstein. Not only is the piece included on her 2017 album, Mozart in Havana, but the concerto served as a point of artistic connection between Dinnerstein and the Havana Lyceum Orchestra, with which she performed the piece while visiting Cuba in 2015, at the invitation of her teacher and esteemed pianist, Solomon Mikowsky. Gramophone describes Dinnerstein’s approach to piece, which she also recorded with the Havana Lyceum Orchestra for her album, as having a “wide yet subtle palette of tonal shadings and articulations,” while also applauding her “crisp fingerwork and strategic left-hand accents” in the concerto’s finale.

Viewers may tune in for a livestream of this performance at: https://youtu.be/8SI9vBFA4cM

Following her recording of Mozart in Havana, Dinnerstein brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the United States for the very first time, raising the funding, booking the concerts, and organizing their housing and transport. Together, she and the orchestra played eleven concerts from Miami to Boston.

In addition to Mozart in Havana, Dinnerstein has made twelve albums, all of which topped the Billboard classical charts, with repertoire ranging from François Couperin to Philip Glass. From 2020 to 2022, she has 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 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..

This season, Simone has taken on a number of new artistic challenges. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she has conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord). In addition, she premieres Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos placed throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. She also joined Renée Fleming, the Emerson String Quartet, and Uma Thurman for performances of André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at both Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

More About Simone Dinnerstein: Simone Dinnerstein is an American pianist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and dog, less than a mile from the hospital in which she was born.

Simone has a distinctive musical voice. The Washington Post has called her “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity.” 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.”

Since that recording, she has had a busy performing career. She has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and the 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, the Seoul Arts Center and the Sydney Opera House.

In recent years, Simone has created projects that express her broad musical interests. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for Simone, co-commissioned by twelve American and Canadian orchestras. She collaborated with choreographer Pam Tanowitz to create New Work for Goldberg Variations, which was met with widespread critical acclaim. 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. Most recently, she created her own string ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs from the keyboard. Their performance of Bach’s cantata Ich Habe Genug in March 2020 was the last concert she gave before New York City shut down.

Simone is committed to giving concerts in non-traditional venues and to audiences who don’t often hear classical music. For the last three decades, she has 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. Simone founded Neighborhood Classics in 2009, 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 takes a digital keyboard to elementary school classrooms, helping young children get close to the music she loves. She is a committed supporter and proud alumna of Philadelphia’s Astral Artists, which supports young performers.

Simone 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. The Washington Post comments that “ultimately, 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.

About the Jacksonville Symphony: The Jacksonville Symphony is one of Northeast Florida’s most important cultural institutions. Founded in 1949, the Symphony now enjoys a national reputation, regularly heard on more than 250 public radio stations across the country on Performance Today. Combined with performances aired on Jacksonville’s public radio station WJCT and the organization’s continually growing streaming program, the Symphony reaches over 60,000 individuals through these digital channels. The Symphony’s performance home, Robert E. Jacoby Symphony Hall, is an acoustic gem and offers an intimate and acoustically superior concert experience. Each year thousands enjoy the Symphony’s performances both at Jacoby Symphony Hall in the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts and at venues located throughout the state of Florida. 

The Symphony is a crucial leader in the community for music education, serving four county school districts and over 35,000 students. In addition to offering free tickets to children under the age of 18 for selected Florida Blue Classical concerts, and other special youth pricing, there are several programs to foster music education. 

Led by Symphony Assistant Conductor Daniel Wiley, the Jacksonville Symphony Youth Orchestras (JSYO) serves more than 300 talented musicians from all over Northeast Florida. The six levels of ensembles enable the JSYO to serve the needs of all musicians with individualized, ability-specific instruction. JSYO enriches orchestral instruction by guiding young musicians with quality musical instruction, improving skills and maintaining the highest standards. In June 2018, the Jacksonville Symphony Youth Orchestras embarked on its first national tour as one of only three student orchestras invited to perform in the Los Angeles International Music Festival at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Over the years, the Jacksonville Symphony has hosted some of the most renowned artists of the music world including: Isaac Stern, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Marilyn Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, Itzhak Perlman, Kathleen Battle, Mstislav Rostopovich, Audra McDonald, Joshua Bell, Lang Lang, Alisa Weilerstein, Branford Marsalis , Renée Fleming and Jean-Yves Thibaudet.

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