Simone Dinnerstein is an American pianist with a distinctive musical voice.The Washington Post has 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.”

Since that recording, she has had a busy performing career. She has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonicand the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestraand the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai. She has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Seoul Arts Center and the Sydney Opera House.

Simone has made fourteen albums, all of which topped the Billboard classical charts, with repertoire ranging from Couperin to Glass. She released her newest album, The Eye is the First Circle, on October 18, 2024 via Supertrain Records. The album features Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata and its release was timed to coincide with the American composer’s 150th birthday. The new album is a live recording of the p remiere of Simone’s multimedia production of the same title, which she conceived and directed. The performance took place at the Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University, New Jersey. The Eye is the First Circle also marks her fourteenth and final recording produced with the late Adam Abeshouse.

From 2020 to 2022, she released a trilogy of albums recorded at her home in Brooklyn during the pandemic.A Character of Quiet (Orange Mountain Music, 2020), featuring the music of Philip Glass and Schubert, was described by NPR as, “music that speaks to a sense of the world slowing down,” and by The New Yorker as, “a reminder that quiet can contain multitudes.” Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic (Supertrain Records, 2021), surpassed two million streams on Apple Music and was nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo. The final installment in the trilogy, Undersong, was released in January 2022 on Orange Mountain Music.

In recent years, Simone has created projects that express her broad musical interests. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2. She continues to perform it across the country this season. She premiered Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Following her recording Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the U.S. for the first time, performing eleven concerts. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera. She has also created her own ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs from the keyboard.This season, Simone p resents two series anchored by Bach at Miller Theatre at Columbia University and three performances at the Gogue Center for the Performing Arts at Auburn University one of which features The Eye is the First Circle. She makes her final appearance alongside Renée Fleming, Merle Dandridge, and the Emerson String Quartet as the featured pianist, performing André Previn’s Penelope presented by the Cleveland Orchestra, before the quartet disbands. Additionally this season, she joins Awadagin Pratt for a four-hand piano program presented by Washington Performing Arts at The Kennedy Center, and is the featured soloist for the Chamber Orchestra of New York’s p erformance at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.

Simone is committed to giving concerts in non-traditional venuesand to audiences who don’t often hear classical music. For the last three decades, she has played concerts throughout the United States for the Piatigorsky Foundation, an organization dedicated to the widespread dissemination of classical music. It was for the Piatigorsky Foundation that she gave the first piano recital in the Louisiana state p rison system at the Avoyelles Correctional Center. She has also performed at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in a concert organized by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. In 2009, Simone founded Neighborhood Classics, a concert series open to the public and hosted by New York City Public Schools to raise funds for their music education programs. She also created a program called Bachpacking during which she brought a digital keyboard to elementary school classrooms, helping young children get close to the music she loves. She is a committed supporter and p roud alumna of Philadelphia’s Astral Artists, which supports young performers. Simone is on the piano faculty of the Mannes School of Music and is a guest host/producer of WQXR’s Young Artists Showcase.

Simone counts herself fortunate to have studied with three unique artists: Solomon Mikowsky, Maria Curcio and Peter Serkin, very different musicians who shared the b elief that playing the piano is a means to something greater. The Washington Post comments that “ultimately, it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative.

Jennifer Johnson Cano’s performance in Santa Fe Opera’s recent premiere of The Righteous at Santa Fe Opera earned her accolades from The New York Times, which noted how she “voluptuously captured” the pain and strength of her character. The Wall Street Journal described her as “riveting”, and Opera News has described her as a “matchless interpreter of contemporary opera.”

Her 2024–2025 season highlights include roles in Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s productions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle; Bruckner’s Te Deum with the Orchestre Métropolitain; Haydn’s Mass in Time of War at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; as well as holiday performances of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the Cincinnati Symphony and Handel’s Messiah with the Houston Symphony. She also performs in Arizona Opera’s production of Aida , and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Opera Theatre of St. Louis. 

Cano undertakes a balance of orchestral, opera and chamber music performances each season.  Recent highlights include performances with Houston Grand Opera, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the FLUX Quartet. She has collaborated on numerous projects with The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst, as well as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel in both the US and Europe. She has performed with the New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony and Atlanta Symphony. 

Highlights of Cano’s operatic career have included performing the roles of Donna Elvira, Carmen and Offred with Boston Lyric Opera; performances of  El Niño  with the London Symphony Orchestra; and Carmen with New Orleans Opera. She has appeared in more than 100 performances on the stage at The Metropolitan Opera since her debut 14 years ago. Cano debuted the role of Virginia Woolf in the world premiere of Kevin Puts’s The Hours with The Philadelphia Orchestra about which The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “…her mezzo-soprano tone was deeply alluring.” 

Ms. Cano joined the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at The Metropolitan Opera after winning the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Among her honors are Winner of the Young Concert Artist International Auditions, a Sara Tucker Study Grant, a Richard Tucker Career Grant and a George London Award.  

“Dramatic intelligence and imagination suffused every note of Ms. Johnson Cano’s performance. Endowed with an attention-grabbing dark mezzo, its depths bracing like strong coffee, she seems to thrive in the role of a storyteller.” — The New York Times 

Since its founding in 1974 by Artistic Director Emeritus Richard Coffey, CONCORA  has held a unique place in the arts community as Connecticut’s first professional choir, and has built a reputation for artistic excellence throughout New England. The ensemble was the recipient of the 2003 Governor’s Arts Award, joining the ranks of such recipients as Marion Anderson, Arthur Miller, and Jacques Pepin. A truly regional choir, CONCORA regularly performs beyond central Connecticut, including Stamford, Storrs, Stonington, New London, and Worcester, Massachusetts.

CONCORA is the resident choir of the CT Early Music Festival under the direction of Ian Watson, and has appeared on many occasions with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. The choir has long had a special relationship with the music of J.S. Bach; in addition to performing all of Bach’s major choral works in recent years, it gave the 2021 world premiere of the Prayer in B Minor, a Hebrew version of Bach’s B Minor Mass. In conjunction with Music Worcester, CONCORA is a major partner in THE COMPLETE BACH from 2024 to 2035, the first project in America to present everything that Bach ever wrote.

Under the leadership of Artistic Director Chris Shepard, the choir has deepened its commitment to socially-conscious programming over the past decade, particularly in its Music with a Mission collaborations with Asylum Hill Congregational Church. They have presented Considering Matthew Shepard with the UCONN Chamber Choir, Geoffrey Hudson’s Passion for the Planet, Reena Esmail’s This Love Between Us, Edward Tyler’s An American Requiem, as well as retrospective concerts honoring the legacy of Black composers Margaret Bonds and Moses Hogan.

​The annual Summer Festival, now in its 25th year, is a major component of CONCORA’s educational programming, and the organization has just launched Choral Mentors, a new educational initiative that sends singers into the community to work in area schools. CONCORA’S singers are drawn from throughout New England. Each is a trained singer, and although they represent many professional fields—from teachers, composers, and conductors to speech pathologists, ministers, and lawyers—together they share an abiding love for choral music and a desire to serve their community through singing.

Baroklyn is a group of string players lead by Simone Dinnerstein from the piano. They are a community that shares the artistic vision that music should be creative and new.  Rehearsal is important to them, and Simone has been influenced by theater practice in which we listen to each other and pass musical ideas and phrases within the group. They rehearse and perform in a semi-circle around the piano and she rearranges parts to emphasize lines, voices and imitative qualities to create a sense of dialogue. Dinnerstein often works with the composer Philip Lasser who makes continuo parts in his contemporary idiom.

The members of Baroklyn are predominantly female, although not exclusively! That’s a reflection of the fact that they are outstanding musicians who Simone discovered and brought together through networks of friendship.