Although primarily known as a Bach interpreter, pianist Simone Dinnerstein and her string ensemble, Baroklyn, find a natural affinity for the music of Philip Glass, the subject of Hourglass, her first recording for the Naïve label. Yet affinity alone hardly explains the uncanny sense of inevitability that permeates these performances. What emerges instead is a meeting of imaginations preoccupied with the strange elasticity of passing moments and the hidden variations between them. In the album booklet, the ensemble’s leader observes that every repetition in Glass reacts to what preceded it while anticipating what follows. Nothing remains static. “We hear it
Read more
Chamber Music, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, Twentieth Century Composer
Decoda Celebrates “American Renaissance” Decoda Weill Recital Hall – Carnegie Hall May 12, 2026 By Christian Carey Published in Sequenza 21 NEW YORK – Founded in 2012, Decoda is an ensemble, composed of a wind quintet, string quartet, and piano, whose members had worked together in Ensemble Connect, a fellowship program at Carnegie Hall and the Juilliard School. This season the musicians continue that relationship with Carnegie Hall. Their concert last Tuesday at Weill Hall is part of the season’s 250th American anniversary celebrations. Titled “American Renaissance,” it featured composers who had relationships to the Harlem Renaissance, either
Read moreThe final day of this year’s Long Play Festival appropriately began en plein air with a performance of John Luther Adams’ Crossing Open Ground – fitting for a composer whose music doesn’t simply reflect nature so much as exist within it. Led by percussionist and conductor Doug Perkins, the hour-long piece for forty musicians unfolded near the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in the tranquil surroundings of Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. As with several other Adams works – including his Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean – Crossing Open Ground emerged from the margins of silence, its opening sounds indistinguishable from the environment to which they belonged. What
Read more