Simone Dinnerstein has spent the better part of two decades in Bach’s orbit, and whatever doubts one might harbor about an artist so single-mindedly devoted to a single composer, her instincts about when to step outside that orbit have proved surprisingly reliable. This Glass disc is the most persuasive evidence yet.
The pairing is shrewder than it first appears. Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 — “Tirol,” written in 2000 for the Tyrolean landscape and its particular quality of Alpine stillness — two years before he cannibalized some of its most affecting melodic material for The Hours. That sequence of recycling and refinement is central to understanding how Glass works, how his best ideas migrate through his catalogue the way a theme in Bach might surface in a cantata, a keyboard suite, and an organ prelude in different guises. Hearing the concerto first, then The Hours suite, you catch Glass in the act of self-quotation — and the catching of it matters.
The Hours music should have won the Oscar. I realize that’s a sentence critics aren’t supposed to write with this much confidence, but Elliot Goldenthal’s score for Frida has essentially vanished from the concert life of the past twenty years, while Glass’s music for Stephen Daldry’s film — those obsessive, waterlogged arpeggios, that peculiar grief — has lodged itself permanently in the repertory. The suite arrangement by Michael Reisman, Glass’s longtime collaborator, is something more than a compilation; it shapes the material into a genuinely architectural form, with its own momentum and its own logic of arrival and departure.
Reisman’s own album of this suite on Glass’s Orange Mountain Music label is no negligible thing. He plays it with absolute authority — the authority of a man who has been inside this music for decades, who understands the machine. But Dinnerstein is doing something different. Where Reisman is percussive, deliberate, almost clinical in his attack, she finds a kind of suspended delicacy that suits the film’s atmosphere of submerged dread — those three women, those three decades, all of them drowning quietly. She takes the opening movement at a pace that feels almost too slow, almost willfully hesitant. And then you remember what the music is actually about, and the hesitancy becomes completely right.
There’s a specific quality to the way Dinnerstein voices a Glass arpeggio — the top note just slightly more present than the harmonic motion below it — that gives even the most relentless passages a sense of breath. This is a Bachian mastery, actually. The way she subdivides the pulse without ever losing its forward motion calls to mind her approach to the Goldberg Variations, that famous and contentious 2007 recording that some found too slow and romantic and that sold spectacularly anyway. She was right then. She’s right here.
The concerto is the more interesting musical discovery — less celebrated, more austere, its slow movement carrying those melodic seeds that would bloom so lustrously in The Hours. Dinnerstein and the period-instrument ensemble Baroklyn make an unexpected but effective combination. The leaner string textures, the reduced mass of the ensemble, keep the piano fully audible without forcing Dinnerstein to push. Glass’s minimalist language doesn’t demand period reading practice the way Handel does, but the combination works because it creates a certain transparency — you hear the counterpoint between soloist and orchestra, such as it is, with unusual clarity.
Recorded at Merkin Hall, the sound is close and warm without being congested. The hall suits this music.
Two works, fifty-seven minutes, a single argument about a composer who is still, in some quarters, not quite taken seriously as a concert-hall figure. Dinnerstein takes him seriously. So should we.
