Simone Dinnerstein and Awadagin Pratt

Both of the pianists on tonight’s program are known as acclaimed solo artists. Here they come together to present a fresh perspective on works by living composers and titans of the classical canon, in solo moments and arrangements for two pianos.

Simone Dinnerstein and Awadagin Pratt are accustomed to filling the Miller Theatre stage with pianos. One of their first performances together was a concert here in 2017 of Bach keyboard concertos, featuring works for one, two, three, and four instruments. The pianists had become acquainted some years earlier through cellist Zuill Bailey, with whom each had performed and recorded, and they began trying out some offstage readings. Dinnerstein recalls an early meeting, backstage before a Pratt recital, when he suggested they try some piano four-hands material and she was amazed that any soloist would have the wherewithal to do anything of the sort before a performance.

That eventually led to a single piano, four-hands performance at the Kennedy Center in 2023. They have continued to perform some arrangements this way, including the Beethoven Symphony No. 6, Pastoral, on this program, but have since landed on using two pianos for a richer, more layered sound.

The works on each half of the program will be performed without pause, a format that the pianists have found draws out unexpected connections between works of today and yesteryear. Pratt opens the concert with Castillo Interior by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. The solo work is an arrangement of a piece by the same name that Vasks composed for violin and cello in 2013. It was reworked for Pratt’s 2023 commissioning and recording project STILLPOINT, which drew together seven composers to create music based on T.S. Eliot’s poem The Four Quartets.

Castillo Interior was originally inspired by different source material—a 1755 text by Spanish and Carmelite nun and Christian mystic St. Teresa of Avila, written after her vision of a castle with seven chambers representing stages of spiritual development. While it strayed a bit from the initial STILLPOINT concept, Pratt relished the opportunity to work with Vasks. “There is a searing expressiveness to his music. Some of it is absolutely painful, but it’s all very beautiful, very contemplative,” he says. Pratt sees the resulting piano version of Castillo Interior as more of an adaptation than a transcription, as Vasks added new material to the work that has a gently flowing, minimalist feel.

It is a prime example of the interest Pratt and Dinnerstein have in presenting works by living composers, which provides an opportunity to consult and collaborate with them, as opposed to relying on interpretation alone. Liner notes for STILLPOINT include some of the extensive correspondence between Vasks and Pratt as Castillo Interior evolved for solo piano. Pratt has experimented with programming this version with the original on some previous concerts and reports that audience members often prefer the piano rendering.

Dinnerstein invites audience members to take in the experience of listening to a solo pianist as the program opens, even as they see two pianos and two performers on stage. “It’s very interesting to sit on the stage, listening to Awadagin. There’s something about the attention of being present but not playing that is very powerful, because to be experiencing a performer listening influences how the audience is listening as well,” she says. It’s a point Dinnerstein took from her son, an actor, who made her aware of the importance of performers, even those in the background, truly listening to and remaining engaged with other characters on stage, regardless of who is speaking.

Castillo Interior ends on a D major chord, serving as an aural bridge into the very different character of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K.448. The three-movement sonata is one of the few works Mozart composed for two pianos. It was created for his own performance with another well-known pianist of the time who was his student, Josepha Auernhammer. Pratt describes the sparkling, effervescent sonata, written in 1781, when the composer was 25 years old, as one of the most Mozartian of Mozart pieces. “There’s a very beautiful slow movement bookended by two very spirited movements” he says. Dinnerstein adds: “The playfulness between the two pianos is so much fun to watch and to play. And then there are these beautiful sections Mozart always includes, where it cycles through the circle of fifths—those are particularly gorgeous parts of the piece. It’s a very ebullient piece of music, really joyful.”

The second half of the program opens with Dinnerstein taking the solo role in Philip Glass’s Étude No. 6. The pianist has garnered praise for her performances and recordings of Glass works. And it has offered another opportunity to be in dialogue with one of today’s most celebrated composers–Glass wrote his Piano Concerto No. 3 for Dinnerstein in 2017.

The composer was inspired to create a concerto for Dinnerstein after hearing her play some of his Études. Étude No. 6, written in 1996, is part of a larger collection of 20 such pieces he composed from 1992 through 2012. The process began as an exercise for Glass to test his own skills as a pianist, although the latter Études grew to include technical challenges better suited to established soloists. Of No. 6, Dinnerstein says, “It’s an étude in repeated notes. There’s a kind of motor to it, which is nice as a contrast to the piece that comes right after it.” The étude is structured in sections somewhat like a rondo with the final three sections repeating what has come before, in backward order, so the piece ends as it began. “It’s kind of a circle,” says Dinnerstein, adding that the rather dark, unfinished feeling of the minimalist work contrasts with the hopeful attitude of the Pastoral. “You feel this kind of relief, that the Glass left you hanging and then the Beethoven just lights you up.”

The Beethoven in question is his Symphony No. 6, nicknamed Pastoral for its evocation of bucolic episodes in the countryside. Dinnerstein and Pratt play a transcription by Selmar Bagge, a German composer active in the late 1800s, rather than the better-known Lizst version. For those who have never heard a full Beethoven symphony performed on piano, the experience can be revelatory, as it was for Dinnerstein when she first encountered Glenn Gould’s recording of the Pastoral as a teenager. “It’s almost like you hear the bones of the piece in a way you can’t when you hear all the instruments of an orchestra,” she says. “Of course, the orchestration is in technicolor. But with piano, there’s just something about it that makes you aware of the counterpoint taking place.”

The symphony was a rare occasion for Beethoven to insert a sense of programmatic material into a composition, with bird sounds, a flowing brook, a thunderstorm, and a shepherd’s song called out in his descriptions like this one for the first movement: “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside.” Not easy to achieve with piano alone, Pratt notes, “It’s harder for us to get the variety of color there as in an orchestra. We can do a good degree of mimicry, but it's really a challenge to create a flute sound, a bird sound, a cello sound. What might be lost in terms of the variety of color is gained in the clarity of the music, the sense of purpose. It’s a different experience.”

Hearing Symphony No. 6 in a more abstract way plays into what Dinnerstein describes as a possible aesthetic theme of the program she and Pratt have built. The selections are not of the showy, virtuosic type common to many dual piano performances, but rather selections that may propel listeners to consider them architecturally: their basic structures, how they were assembled, and how they flow together.

Rebecca Winzenried is a New York-based arts writer and former program editor at the New York Philharmonic.

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