Simone Dinnerstein and Awadagin Pratt

American pianists Simone Dinnerstein and Awadagin Pratt have long garnered individual praise for their originality and astounding technical prowess. Beyond their mutual passion for and prestige with the piano, Dinnerstein and Pratt share a long time friendship and appreciation for collaborative performance. The two musicians have performed together many times over their respective careers, cultivating a deep respect and admiration for one another’s artistry.

For the upcoming seasons 26/27 – 27/28 Dinnerstein and Pratt offer Recital and Concerti programs. See more on Program page.

About the Artists:

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

“Ultimately, it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.”
– The Washington Post

“a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.”
– The New York Times

Simone Dinnerstein is an American pianist with 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.

Simone has made fourteen albums, all of which topped the Billboard classical charts, with repertoire ranging from Couperin to Glass. She released her newest album, The Eye is the First Circle, on October 18, 2024 via Supertrain Records. The album features Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata and its release was timed to coincide with the American composer’s 150th birthday. The new album is a live recording of the premiere of Simone’s multimedia production of the same title, which she conceived and directed. The performance took place at the Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University, New Jersey. The Eye is the First Circle also marks her fourteenth and final recording produced with the late Adam Abeshouse.

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.

In recent years, Simone 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 Piano Sonata No. 2. She continues to perform it across the country this season. 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. She has also created her own ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs from the keyboard. This season, Simone presents two series anchored by Bach at Miller Theatre at Columbia University and three performances at the Gogue Center for the Performing Arts at Auburn University one of which features The Eye is the First Circle. She makes her final appearance alongside Renée Fleming, Merle Dandridge, and the Emerson String Quartet as the featured pianist, performing André Previn’s Penelope presented by the Cleveland Orchestra, before the quartet disbands. Additionally this season, she joins Awadagin Pratt for a four-hand piano program presented by Washington Performing Arts at The Kennedy Center, and is the featured soloist for the Chamber Orchestra of New York’s performance at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.

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. In 2009, Simone founded 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 committed supporter and proud alumna of Philadelphia’s Astral Artists, which supports young performers. Simone is on the piano faculty of the Mannes School of Music and is a guest host/producer of WQXR’s Young Artists Showcase.

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.

Website: www.simonedinnerstein.com

“forceful, imaginative, and precisely tinted”
– The Washington Post

“one of the great and distinctive American pianists and conductors of our time.”

– WGBH

Through his kaleidoscopic career as a pianist, conductor, educator, and curator of memorable musical moments, Awadagin Pratt shines a light on voices of the past and present, amplifies the diverse talents of today’s brightest creative minds, and paves the way for a new generation of inventive musical artists.

Since winning the Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1992 and receiving a1994 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Pratt has received acclaim for delivering “forceful, imaginative, and precisely tinted” performances (The Washington Post) and been hailed as “one of the great and distinctive American pianists and conductors of our time” (WGBH). He has appeared at addresses as familiar as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (at the invitation of the Clinton and Obama administrations) and Sesame Street (at the invitation of Big Bird): He has performed with the Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, the New York Philharmonic, and many others; in solo recitals at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center; and in chamber music collaborations with cellist Zuill Bailey, pianist Simone Dinnerstein, and the Harlem and St. Lawrence String Quartets. His 2023 recording, Stillpoint, explores the truth and beauty in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets through new works by Tyshawn Sorey, Paola Prestini, Peteris Vasks, Jessie Montgomery, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Alvin Singleton, and Judd Greenstein.

He became principal conductor of the Miami Valley Symphony Orchestra in the 2023/24 season, and he has conducted the Chamber Orchestra of Pittsburgh, Georgia Symphony Orchestra (Tbilisi), and Bang on a Can at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He made his operatic debut leading Porgy and Bess with the Greensboro Opera (North Carolina).

In response to the murder of George Floyd, Pratt created a podcast that evolved into a multimedia musical experience. Performed primarily on college campuses across the U.S., Awadagin Pratt: Black in America, fuses music of Bach, Messiaen, and Liszt with still and moving pictures by filmmaker Alrick Brown and narration in which Pratt chronicles his life – from his time as a music student at the Peabody Conservatory through his ascent to international acclaim – through graphic accounts of numerous police stops and arrests he experienced for Driving While Black. In 2023, a documentary version, directed by Michelle Bauer Carpenter, was screened at film festivals nationwide.

Pratt’s commitment to the next generation of pianists is evidenced by his work as founding director of the Next Generation Festival, the Art of the Piano Foundation, and the Nina Simone Piano Competition, a new biennial competition that celebrates diversity in classical music.

He served as professor and artist in residence at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music for two decades and is now professor of piano at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Awadagin Pratt is a Yamaha artist. For more information, please visit www.awadagin.com.