Simone Dinnerstein: Undersong (CD review)

Piano music by Couperin, Schumann, Glass, and Satie. Simone Dinnerstein, piano. Orange Mountain Music 0156.

By John J. Puccio and Karl W. Nehring

The music according to John:
As you probably know, American classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein loves to do theme albums. The titles alone give you the idea: An American Mosaic, A Character of Quiet, Bach: Strange Beauty, Mozart in Havana, Something Almost Being Said, Night, Bach Re-Invented, Broadway - Lafayette, and now Undersong. Of course, she has done more traditional albums as well, like Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Inventions and Sinfonias, and Beethoven’s Complete Works for Piano and Cello (with cellist Zuill Bailey). But lately, as her name and fame have grown, she has increasingly pursued theme albums.

Undersong is a term I was unfamiliar with, so I looked it up. The Free Dictionary calls it “an accompanying secondary melody”; or “a nuanced meaning.” Merriam-Webster says it’s “a subordinate melody or part; especially, a droning accompaniment or undertone. A refrain.” Ms. Dinnerstein apparently goes with “refrain.” As she says, “Couperin, Schumann, Glass, and Satie constantly revisit the same material, worrying at, shifting it to different harmonies and into different rhythmic shapes. Working with this music in the fall of 2020 was a constant reminder that in my afternoon walk in the Green-wood Cemetery, I was quite literally treading a familiar path every day, a path that nonetheless had changed almost imperceptibly every time I left the house.” Thus, we have the shifting, sometimes hidden texts of these musical pieces with refrains. The whole idea may seem a bit morose (starting with Ms. Dinnerstein’s black-and-white cover photo surrounded by tombstones and looking for all the world like Morticia Addams), but, then, the whole pandemic has been a pretty morose experience.

Nevertheless, whether or not you buy into the slightly murky spirit of the “undersong” business, you can’t deny that Ms. Dinnerstein’s handling of the material is thoughtful, emotional yet restrained, and unfailingly sensitive. Thus informed, we begin with Les Barricades Mysterieuses (“The Mysterious Barricades”) that the French Baroque composer Francois Couperin wrote in 1717. Like its title, the music is evocative, and Ms. Dinnerstein makes the most of it.

Next is an equally famous piece, Arabesque, Op. 18, written by Robert Schumann in 1839. The composer wrote it during a particularly stormy period of his life during which his future wife Clara’s father wanted no part of him as a son-in-law. The music reflects these turbulent yet tender times, and Ms. Dinnerstein adds her own affectionate touch and occasional barb.

Philip Glass comes after that with his solo piano work, Mad Rush (1979). Ms. Dinnerstein describes the music of the disc as the kind to get lost in, and that’s no better expressed than in the Glass piece. It’s kind of looking-glass music (pun intended) with ripples and reflections of all sorts. Ms. Dinnerstein’s gentle yet firm approach has us drifting through a kaleidoscope of musical colors.

Then we get more from Couperin, Tic Toc Choc, a whimsical representation of the rhythms of a clock. Given its eighteenth-century origins, the piece sounds surprisingly modern in Ms. Dinnerstein’s hands.

Then, there’s Gnossienne No. 3 by French composer Erik Satie (1888). “Gnossienne” was a word Satie invented, probably to remind listeners of “gnostic” or spiritual knowledge or maybe of “gnossus” from ancient Crete. Whatever, it is intensely mystical and contemplative.

The program’s penultimate work is the longest, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, a selection of eight movements for solo piano (1838). Schumann regarded it as his favorite work. Here, Ms. Dinnerstein lets her hair down, so to speak, pursuing the sometimes tempestuous, sometimes tranquil segments with equally warmhearted vigor.

Ms. Dinnerstein concludes the disc, appropriately, with a refrain: Couperin’s Les Barricades Redux.

Adam Abeshouse produced and engineered the album, which he recorded in Ms. Dinnerstein’s home in Brooklyn, NY in November 2020. The piano, recorded somewhat closely, sounds honeyed and mellow, with a warm, rich quality that greatly complements the music. Then, too, a mildly resonant acoustic also contributes to the disc’s pleasures.

JJP

The music according to Karl:
American pianist Simone Dinnerstein (b. 1972) first came to my attention and to the attention of many, many others, as it would soon turn out back in 2007 when her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was released on the Telarc label. It was a splendid recording for which I wrote an enthusiastic review in The $ensible Sound. The album shot to the top of Billboard’s classical CD best-sellers list. I’d love to say that its success was in part attributable to my review, but I have every confidence that the good readers of Classical Candor are nowhere near so gullible as to believe such blatant blather. Fast-forward 15 years and I find myself once again reviewing a recording by Ms. Dinnerstein, who has been busy during the pandemic, as Undersong is her third made during this trying time. Isolation can have some compensations for those prepared to make the best of their particular talents and opportunities, and Ms. Dinnerstein has certainly used her talents and opportunities to produce another splendid recording. In her brief liner note, she writes that “all of the music on this album consists of musical forms that have a refrain. Glass, Schumann, Couperin, and Satie constantly revisit the same material in these pieces, shifting it to different harmonies and into different rhythmic shapes. Undersong is an archaic term for a song with a refrain, and to me it also suggests a hidden text. Glass, Schumann, Couperin and Satie all seem to be attempting to find what they want to say through repetition, as though their constant change and recycling will focus the ear and the mind. This is music to get lost in.” She goes on to compare that repetition to her daily afternoon walk through Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where she treads the same path day after day (the B&W cover photo features her posing there on the cemetery path).

Despite that talk of solitary cemetery strolls, the music she has chosen is not morose. The piece by Francois Couperin that opens and closes the album is ruminative, though. Indeed, it would seem that framing the album this way is evidence of a deft artistic touch, the pianist’s way of communicating that she intending her program to be understood as a framed musical composition that she has put together purposefully, beginning and ending a musical journey with something on her mind. Besides, Les Barricades Mysterieuses is an entrancing composition, well worth hearing played twice, ever so slightly slowly to finish the program. Between those opening and closing tunes, there is a varied program that spans the centuries. Following the opening Couperin, Schumann’s Arabesque seems somehow to sustain a  similar feeling despite being dissimilar in style. The pace then picks up as Dinnerstein leans into the pulsing rhythms of Philip Glass’s Mad Rush. I know there are some who are wary of anything by Glass, but to my ears at least, his piano music represents some of the best of his output, and Mad Rush is an excellent piece that sounds perfectly placed in this program. After a brief bon-bon from Couperin, we then come to the longest composition, taking up more than half the time on the CD, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, which consists of eight sections. The music and the mood here are certainly different from the Glass, the Satie, or even the other Schumann, but I quibble. Others may find it more perfectly blended in than did I. My only other quibble is with the liner notes, which are quite brief. It would have been rewarding to have some more insight from Ms. Dinnerstein as to how she came to choose the particular composers and compositions and why she presented them in the order she chose for her program. Still, when you come down to it, this is a really nice release, with a well-played, well-recorded, and thoughtfully chosen program -- music to get lost in.

KWN

To listen to a brief excerpt from this album, click below:

Meet the Staff

Meet the Staff
John J. Puccio, Founder and Contributor

Understand, I'm just an everyday guy reacting to something I love. And I've been doing it for a very long time, my appreciation for classical music starting with the musical excerpts on the Big Jon and Sparkie radio show in the early Fifties and the purchase of my first recording, The 101 Strings Play the Classics, around 1956. In the late Sixties I began teaching high school English and Film Studies as well as becoming interested in hi-fi, my audio ambitions graduating me from a pair of AR-3 speakers to the Fulton J's recommended by The Stereophile's J. Gordon Holt. In the early Seventies, I began writing for a number of audio magazines, including Audio Excellence, Audio Forum, The Boston Audio Society Speaker, The American Record Guide, and from 1976 until 2008, The $ensible Sound, for which I served as Classical Music Editor.

Today, I'm retired from teaching and use a pair of bi-amped VMPS RM40s loudspeakers for my listening. In addition to writing for the Classical Candor blog, I served as the Movie Review Editor for the Web site Movie Metropolis (formerly DVDTown) from 1997-2013. Music and movies. Life couldn't be better.

Karl Nehring, Editor and Contributor

For more than 20 years I was the editor of The $ensible Sound magazine and a regular contributor to both its equipment and recordings review pages. I would not presume to present myself as some sort of expert on music, but I have a deep love for and appreciation of many types of music, "classical" especially, and have listened to thousands of recordings over the years, many of which still line the walls of my listening room (and occasionally spill onto the furniture and floor, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife). I have always taken the approach as a reviewer that what I am trying to do is simply to point out to readers that I have come across a recording that I have found of interest, a recording that I think they might appreciate my having pointed out to them. I suppose that sounds a bit simple-minded, but I know I appreciate reading reviews by others that do the same for me — point out recordings that they think I might enjoy.

For readers who might be wondering about what kind of system I am using to do my listening, I should probably point out that I do a LOT of music listening and employ a variety of means to do so in a variety of environments, as I would imagine many music lovers also do. Starting at the more grandiose end of the scale, the system in which I do my most serious listening comprises Marantz CD 6007 and Onkyo CD 7030 CD players, NAD C 658 streaming preamp/DAC, Legacy Audio PowerBloc2 amplifier, and a pair of Legacy Audio Focus SE loudspeakers. I occasionally do some listening through pair of Sennheiser 560S headphones. I miss the excellent ELS Studio sound system in our 2016 Acura RDX (now my wife's daily driver) on which I had ripped more than a hundred favorite CDs to the hard drive, so now when driving my 2022 Accord EX-L Hybrid I stream music from my phone through its adequate but not outstanding factory system. For more casual listening at home when I am not in my listening room, I often stream music through the phone into a Vizio soundbar system that has tolerably nice sound for such a diminutive physical presence. And finally, at the least grandiose end of the scale, I have an Ultimate Ears Wonderboom II Bluetooth speaker for those occasions where I am somewhere by myself without a sound system but in desperate need of a musical fix. I just can’t imagine life without music and I am humbly grateful for the technology that enables us to enjoy it in so many wonderful ways.

William (Bill) Heck, Webmaster and Contributor

Among my early childhood memories are those of listening to my mother playing records (some even 78 rpm ones!) of both classical music and jazz tunes. I suppose that her love of music was transmitted genetically, and my interest was sustained by years of playing in rock bands – until I realized that this was no way to make a living. The interest in classical music was rekindled in grad school when the university FM station serving as background music for studying happened to play the Brahms First Symphony. As the work came to an end, it struck me forcibly that this was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and from that point on, I never looked back. This revelation was to the detriment of my studies, as I subsequently spent way too much time simply listening, but music has remained a significant part of my life. These days, although I still can tell a trumpet from a bassoon and a quarter note from a treble clef, I have to admit that I remain a nonexpert. But I do love music in general and classical music in particular, and I enjoy sharing both information and opinions about it.

The audiophile bug bit about the same time that I returned to classical music. I’ve gone through plenty of equipment, brands from Audio Research to Yamaha, and the best of it has opened new audio insights. Along the way, I reviewed components, and occasionally recordings, for The $ensible Sound magazine. Most recently I’ve moved to my “ultimate system” consisting of a BlueSound Node streamer, an ancient Toshiba multi-format disk player serving as a CD transport, Legacy Wavelet II DAC/preamp/crossover, dual Legacy PowerBloc2 amps, and Legacy Signature SE speakers (biamped), all connected with decently made, no-frills cables. With the arrival of CD and higher resolution streaming, that is now the source for most of my listening.

Ryan Ross, Contributor

I started listening to and studying classical music in earnest nearly three decades ago. This interest grew naturally out of my training as a pianist. I am now a musicologist by profession, specializing in British and other symphonic music of the 19th and 20th centuries. My scholarly work has been published in major music journals, as well as in other outlets. Current research focuses include twentieth-century symphonic historiography, and the music of Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Malcolm Arnold.

I am honored to contribute writings to Classical Candor. In an age where the classical recording industry is being subjected to such profound pressures and changes, it is more important than ever for those of us steeped in this cultural tradition to continue to foster its love and exposure. I hope that my readers can find value, no matter how modest, in what I offer here.


Bryan Geyer, Technical Analyst

I initially embraced classical music in 1954 when I mistuned my car radio and heard the Heifetz recording of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. That inspired me to board the new "hi-fi" DIY bandwagon. In 1957 I joined one of the pioneer semiconductor makers and spent the next 32 years marketing transistors and microcircuits to military contractors. Home audio DIY projects remained a personal passion until 1989 when we created our own new photography equipment company. I later (2012) revived my interest in two channel audio when we "downsized" our life and determined that mini-monitors + paired subwoofers were a great way to mate fine music with the space constraints of condo living.

Visitors that view my technical papers on this site may wonder why they appear here, rather than on a site that features audio equipment reviews. My reason is that I tried the latter, and prefer to publish for people who actually want to listen to music; not to equipment. My focus is in describing what's technically beneficial to assure that the sound of the system will accurately replicate the source input signal (i. e. exhibit high accuracy) without inordinate cost and complexity. Conversely, most of the audiophiles of today strive to achieve sound that's euphonic, i.e. be personally satisfying. In essence, audiophiles seek sound that's consistent with their desire; the music is simply a test signal.

Mission Statement

It is the goal of Classical Candor to promote the enjoyment of classical music. Other forms of music come and go--minuets, waltzes, ragtime, blues, jazz, bebop, country-western, rock-'n'-roll, heavy metal, rap, and the rest--but classical music has been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for hundreds more. It's no accident that every major city in the world has one or more symphony orchestras.

When I was young, I heard it said that only intellectuals could appreciate classical music, that it required dedicated concentration to appreciate. Nonsense. I'm no intellectual, and I've always loved classical music. Anyone who's ever seen and enjoyed Disney's Fantasia or a Looney Tunes cartoon playing Rossini's William Tell Overture or Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 can attest to the power and joy of classical music, and that's just about everybody.

So, if Classical Candor can expand one's awareness of classical music and bring more joy to one's life, more power to it. It's done its job. --John J. Puccio

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"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa

"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa