“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.
Dinnerstein 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, and feature repertoire ranging from Couperin to Glass. 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. Dinnerstein’s latest 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 (a portmanteau of Baroque and Brooklyn, her home New York borough). 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, 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 Concord Sonata. In 2024, she released The Eye Is the First Circle on Supertrain Records, coinciding with Ives’ 150th birthday. 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. She also premiered Philip Lasser’s The Circle and the Child, which he composed for her, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and recorded it for Sony Classical. In New York, she regularly curates and performs on an innovative Bach series at the Miller Theatre, and she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Kaufman Music Center, where she mentored student musicians and performed Philip Glass’s The Hours and Tirol piano concerto with Baroklyn.
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. She has served on the jury of the Leeds International Piano Competition, the Bach Competition Leipzig, the ARD International Music Competition, the Young Concert Artists Auditions, and the Hilton Head International Piano Competition. 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.
Simone Dinnerstein is represented worldwide by Tanja Dorn at Dorn Music.
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September 2025
Website: www.simonedinnerstein.com
