Pianist Simone Dinnerstein's latest album on Sony Classical, Something Almost Being Said, was released on January 31 and in its first week on sale reached No. 2 on the Billboard Classical Chart and cracked both the Billboard Heatseekers and Billboard Top Current Albums Charts, which rank music sales in all genres. According to Billboard, Ms. Dinnerstein was also the top-selling classical instrumentalist of 2011.
Something Almost Being Said combines J. S. Bach's Partitas Nos. 1 and 2, with Schubert's Four Impromptus, Op. 90, and was recorded at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York by Grammy-winning producer Adam Abeshouse. The title is taken from English poet Philip Larkin's poem, The Trees. Ms. Dinnerstein says of her new album, "Bach and Schubert, to my ears, share a distinctive quality. Their non-vocal music has a powerful narrative, a vocal element. The effect is that of wordless voices singing textless melodies. 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."
The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote of the new album, “No ‘almost’ about it. What's being said by this recital of works by Bach and Schubert is that pianist Simone Dinnerstein is an artist of serious distinction, deserving serious attention… Consider this the new benchmark.” And The San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Bach is once again the mainstay, with heartfelt renditions of the First and Second Partitas framing the disc. In between come Schubert's Four Impromptus, Op. 90, in a performance that is both athletic and reflective.”