The Washington Post 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."

Simone Dinnerstein brings her distinctive artistry to Harris Concert Hall with a Baroque and Baroque-inspired program. She has been playing Phillip Lasser’s 12 Variations on a Chorale by J.S. Bach for over two decades. In it, the composer takes the chorale from Cantata No. 101 in which, he says, “Bach chooses a particular melodic moment from the Lutheran hymn and infuses all the other voices of the Chorale with this unique sonority, with an almost maniacal insistence. In my Variations, I take on this mania to see how far one can go.”

Next are a set of variations by Bach’s contemporary Rameau on his own gavotte.

Bach wrote the 15 Sinfonias for the musical education of his son Wilhelm Friedrich. The goals were to develop dexterity and stimulate the imagination by showing different ways that musical ideas can be treated. Keith Jarrett’s Encore from Tokyo takes the Baroque convention of a descending repeating bass line and builds around it a harmonically adventurous and wide-ranging improvisation.

Hear one of the piano world’s most inventive, searching, and expressive artists in this Bach and more recital.