After the success of Simone Dinnerstein’s first album for Sony Classical, “Bach – A strange beauty”, which immediately earned the No.1 spot on the US Billboard Classical Chart, and is one of the few classical albums to make the US Billboard Top 200, Simone’s second Sony album is again devoted to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. This time the pianist juxtaposes music by J S Bach with that of Franz Schubert.

Simone Dinnerstein believes the music of Bach and Schubert shares a certain distinctive quality: “their non-vocal music has a powerful narrative, a vocal element… Bach and Schubert’s melodic lines are so fluent, so expressive, and so minutely inflected that they sound as though they might at any moment burst suddenly into speech. They sound like something almost being said.”

Inspired by lines from Philip Larkin’s poem “The Trees”, Simone Dinnerstein brings her own unique voice to Bach’s first two Partitas and Schubert’s Four Impromptus Op.90, revealing the inherent vocal qualities in these instrumental works.

The decision to place the Schubert Four Impromptus inbetween Bach’s Partitas only serves to emphasize the similarities between the works which were written over 100 years apart.