Simone Dinnerstein & A Far Cry - Circles: Piano Concertos by Philip Glass & JS Bach (2018)

On Glass Piano Concerto No.3: Like a slowly-whirling centrifuge, Philip Glass s beguiling new Piano Concerto No. 3 given its world premiere at Jordan Hall on Friday by A Far Cry and pianist Simone Dinnerstein isolates and concentrates two aspects of the composer s personality long in particularly intriguing tension: his romantic streak and his meditative austerity. Much of the concerto is a lush churn of unsettled harmonies, soloist and string orchestra in search of resolution. Yet resolution comes not with triumph, but by deliberate, cyclical turns. Dinnerstein opened with a gentle clutch of full, familiar triadic chords, shifting by seconds and thirds, the tonality both enveloping and undermining itself. Throughout the first two movements, minor-tinged melodies and portions of quiet, chromatic bravura from the piano were like 19th-century ghosts drifting in and out of the shadows. Most fascinating was how the steady rhythmic engine was manipulated to produce something like Romantic-era rubato: by polyrhythms in the first movement, steady two-against-three rhythms suddenly leaning into one or the other, and additive rhythms in the second movement, an extra tick of the clock here and there producing a charmingly mechanical swoon. A ruminative cadenza led into the finale, dedicated to the Estonian minimalist Arvo Pärt, and, more than the other two movements, unfolding along classic minimalist lines. Three simple, open-ended progressions, delicately smudged by dissonance, repeated and circled one another with tolling, deliberate tread. It is a drawn-out statement the slow-turning gears of karmic alignment but the players sustained the mood with conviction. Throughout, both Dinnerstein and the Criers seized on opportunities for expression; Glass s engineered rubato was often pressed home with a dose of the genuine article. But they also caught and held the music s patient grandeur, giving each phrase, each chord judicious gravity. --The Boston Globe

Glass s music, however, came off as indeed farsighted. Originally a pure modern contrapuntalist, he has come to resemble Bruckner, himself a master of counterpoint. Glass s symphonies there are now 11 have been the primary means for him to try out new uses for vertical harmony and an increasingly expansive expressive language... The new concerto is close in form and style to the current symphonies, especially the excellent No. 11 which premiered earlier this year. In concept, the concerto is a companion to the Concerto for Two Pianos, heard from the New York Philharmonic last week, and likewise an embodiment of Glass s stated interest in putting the piano into conversation rather than opposition with the orchestra. In method, the piece was full of new ideas. There were the familiar rocking tremolos and repeated cadences, but there was also music that had an atypical sense of uncertainty chord changes and harmonic rhythms that not only moved in surprising directions but that drifted off without coming to the resolute orderliness that marks Glass. Many of the cadences were new in his work as well, his insistent language using a new vocabulary. There are four cadenzas interspersed among the three movements, and while they don t share the heroic profiles of the common concerto, they did display Dinnerstein s artistry. Glass wrote this work specifically for her, after hearing her play his work and Schubert in his home, and his own thinking and playing were clearly in deep sympathy with each other. The cadenzas are beautiful, expressive music inside a concerto that itself is beautiful and dramatically expressive, the shape pointing toward heightened moments of realization and resolution. In the performance, the feeling was romantic in the way of revealing personal truths, and Dinnerstein sounded deeply touched by the music flowing through her hands. This was a marvelous performance of a marvelous new work. --New York Classical Review