Dinnerstein recital examines 'repetition and obsession'

Dinnerstein recital examines ‘repetition and obsession’

JESSICA CABE Festival Focus Writer

In an era of instant replays, looping social media tools, retweeting, and other machine-assisted repetition, pianist Simone Dinnerstein is using her recital program at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) to examine what repetition and obsession sounds like coming from a live musician.

Dinnerstein will perform a program of Couperin, Schumann, Philip Glass, and Satie at 8 pm on Thursday, August 8, in Harris Concert Hall.

“The central idea of the program is the concept of obsessive thinking, circular thinking,” Dinnerstein says. “I found pieces of music that explored always returning to the same idea.”

The program begins with Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses from Second livre de pièces de clavecin, a piece that is written in rondo form. The music is constructed in different sections that alternate with each other and keep returning. The circular music also features rhythms that feel somehow not quite right, as if the pianist is dropping a beat, creating urgency in the sound.

Dinnerstein says she crafted this program because of her own personal experience with repetition and obsession as a musician and mother. Being a musician means playing the same passage, the same piece, over and over again. And she has watched her children read the same book or watch the same movie for nights on end.

“Repetition and circular thinking is a way we have of processing things,” she says. “You think of one thing, then that leads you to thinking of another thing, and suddenly you’re back to where you started. What I like about exploring this in a live concert is there’s nothing automated about it. Each time I play this program, it feels different. It feels like something that’s very relevant to most people.”

Dinnerstein is known for crafting thoughtful, thematic programs, which may come from growing up in a family of artists.

“Her father is a famous painter,” says Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor. “So nothing she does is done frivolously. Her curation of her program is just not wasted on anything. It’s brilliant. But this is not an intellectual exercise; it’s a journey she takes her audience on, and her choices of pieces always render an ‘aha’ moment for any listener at the end.”

Dinnerstein will then play directly into Schumann’s Arabesque in C major, another piece that features a roughly rondo form, before segueing into Philip Glass’s Mad Rush.

“Glass really takes repetition of sections to almost an extreme place,” Dinnerstein says. “What I like about it is it’s the idea of returning to something you’ve said before, but each time you return to it, as a human being, it is never exactly the same. There are so many opportunities to come back and try to see it in a different light.”

Rounding out the first half of the program is Couperin’s Le tic-tocchoc, ou Les maillotins from Troisiéme livre de piéces de clavecin 18 ordre. The work sounds similar to Glass rhythmically, Dinnerstein says.

“It almost sounds like a machine or mechanical instrument that, in my opinion, is almost philosophical,” she says. “It feels like the turning of the earth.”

Something exciting about her program is that the works are not in chronological order, and they are played without pause. This creates a sense that the journey she’s taking audiences on is not based in time. It starts to feel like Glass influenced Couperin rather than the other way around.

The second half of Dinnerstein’s program begins with Satie’s Gnossienne No. 3, a shorter piece that consists of one phrase that keeps returning. The work has no meter, and “it’s almost like a run-on sentence,” Dinnerstein says.

The evening will conclude with Schumann’s Kreisleriana, op. 16, a work that is quintessentially Schumann in its obsessiveness, and that plays off the repetition of the Satie.

“There’s something about that obsessive working through an idea that both pieces have in common,” Dinnerstein says. “It plays with the idea of playing something, leaving it, and returning to it again.”