Long before I met with Simone Dinnerstein for the first time, I was already admiring her. In 2000, I heard her play at Juilliard’s Schumann Concerto Competition, and despite the fact that Jeremy Denk, her competitor at the time, was chosen to play the concerto with the orchestra, I felt very strongly about her performance as well, and developed an interest in the young pianist.

And so it came as no surprise for me when years later I learned about her huge recording success which followed a performance of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" in March 2005 and her debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in November of the same year. I had the chance to talk to Simone at Sweet Melissa, a small Brooklyn restaurant near her son’s elementary school.

“My career was not calculated but kind of happened," she told me. "The 'Goldberg' was a big project. I had to raise the money for the recording with the help of friends, find a producer, and then a recording studio. The motivation came from performing the 'Goldberg' for a number of years. I felt I had something different to say and wanted to document it, not knowing at the time where all this was going to lead me.”

She continues: “I didn’t know whether any label would be interested in it. Then Adam Abeshouse edited the aria and the first five variations, and passed it around to a few people in the music world. Suddenly people wanted to talk to me. Where I had been having trouble to get my foot in the door before, now everybody wanted to hear me live.”

A music lover from Israel she had never met before was willing to sponsor the first concert, and Dinnerstein made the acquaintance of Tanja Dorn of IMG Artists who would become her agent. Her career was somehow taking a different turn.

Still, she continues to be very grounded. When asked how she dealt with the impact of being a wife and mother, and simultaneously having to meet the demands of a career suddenly taking off, she told me, “People always ask me about my son, which doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue for my male colleagues, even though there are many fathers consciously holding back their careers to devote more time to their children as well. This situation still seems to create more of a conflict for women." And she added, “Of course being with my family is very important to me. My manager tries to accommodate me in terms of my time away from home. I’m never away for more than two weeks. I also try to divide up my time into very defined segments, like private time spent with my husband and son, and time for practice and concerts. The hardest part is to be present and focused whereever you are at any one time. It is easy to get distracted, and although we women are supposed to be good at multitasking, the ongoing challenge is to find the right balance”.

Article Author: Ilona Oltuski

Ilona Oltuski was born in Germany, where she studied art history and published her doctorate about the Bezalel art movement. She discovered her penchant for writing again much later, through another interest of hers, the piano. …

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