Simone Dinnerstein, piano

Simone Dinnerstein is a brilliant thinker and collaborator who not only interprets work but reimagines and recontextualizes it through lush and gorgeous recitals that exhibit what The New Yorker has described as "lean, knowing, and unpretentious elegance."

Dinnerstein's fifth recital for Duke Performances will traverse three centuries of musical history, and the idea of movement across time. By playing four distinct works as a suite, she explores the structural underpinnings that unite them. Dinnerstein has described the final coda of Schumann's Arabeske, op. 18 as "sounding absolutely contemporary," and thus she moves from its final note to the first of Philip Glass's Mad Rush. Written in 1979 as a piece of indefinite length, Mad Rush honored the fourteenth Dalai Lama's visit to the United States, and its flexibility allows Dinnerstein to connect Schumann to Couperin. Along with her interpretive strength, Dinnerstein is a master curator, and her virtual program could only come from the connection-drawing mind that put forth a 2018 album composed of a diptych of Bach and Glass concertos.

- Nan Pincus