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Simone Dinnerstein chats about 'The Eye is the First Circle' with 103.5 Hindsight Media Radio

Posted: January 16, 2025

Described by The Washington Post as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity,” GRAMMY®-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein, recently released her new album, The Eye is the First Circle  featuring iconic American composer Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, via Supertrain Records. Timed to coincide with Ives’ 150th birthday on October 20, the new album is a live recording of the premiere of Dinnerstein’s multimedia production of the same title, at the Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University, New Jersey on October 17, 2021.

The recording is Dinnerstein's last to be released with her longtime recording partner, GRAMMY-winning producer Adam Abeshouse, who also produced her previous thirteen albums. She says, “The Eye is the First Circle was a deeply personal project for me, and it was very meaningful to have Adam there. It is even more meaningful that this marks our last album together.”

Dinnerstein has long been drawn to the music of Charles Ives. “There is a type of wild struggle in his music between the weighty influences of the past and the Americana of his upbringing and his quest for developing his own musical language,” she says. “The music seems to vacillate between a kind of haunting memory of beauty and an extremely dissonant and forward-looking anticipation of the future. It’s deeply human, incorporating tragedy and comedy, a striving for the spiritual and an embrace of popular culture. In our present day, when every one of us is able at the drop of the hat to curate the most esoteric of playlists, both literally and metaphorically, his music resonates deeply.”

With her production The Eye is the First Circle, Simone Dinnerstein ventured into bold interdisciplinary artistic territory in collaboration with projection designer Laurie Olinder and lighting designer Davison Scandrett. Conceived and directed by Dinnerstein, the dynamic production deconstructs and collages elements from two iconic works of art – Simone’s father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata – and also incorporates ambient sounds of children playing, night sounds from the pond, and birdsong.

In the live, multimedia performance, Simon Dinnerstein’s The Fulbright Triptych places a family portrait (including an infant Simone) within the tradition of Medieval altar paintings, against a wall teeming with art historical references, and the Concord Sonata expresses the imaginative and natural world of the Transcendentalists through an ecstatic and fractured musical lens. Olinder pulls visuals including animated elements of the painting and real-time video to all points of the stage, and Scandrett’s lighting gives them breathtaking theatricality. Dinnerstein’s searching performance sits within this disorientingly immersive visual space. The piece asks: How do our origin stories mold us? How can a sense of self come from the musical and visual fragments we remember from childhood?

The Eye is the First Circle was inspired in part by a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Circles: “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.”

Dinnerestein explains the work further, writing in the liner notes for this album: “We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming – a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being. Ives’ music teems with invention, with the music that was all around him – art music and popular music – from which he, in turn, created his own distinctive and changing voice. . . This artistic project was a way in which I could ponder the process we’ve all been through – the accretion of experiences and influences that brought me to the place I was. It was an attempt to do what Emerson argued that we all want to do: to draw a new circle.”

In addition to the premiere at Montclair State University presented and commissioned by PEAK Performances, Dinnerstein has performed The Eye is the First Circle at the Folly Theater in Kansas City presented by the Harriman Jewell Series and at the Gogue Performing Arts Center at Auburn University.   Track List:

Charles Ives: Concord Sonata
1. "Emerson" (after Ralph Waldo Emerson) [16:19]
2. "Hawthorne" (after Nathaniel Hawthorne) [12:21]
3. "The Alcotts" (after Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott) [5:33]
4. "Thoreau" (after Henry David Thoreau) [11:31]

Dinnerstein discussed the recording with Hindsight Media Radio 103.5. Listen to the attached conversation