// Buy Something Almost Being Said

Sony released Simone's latest album, Something Almost Being Said: Music of Bach and Schubert, internationally on January 30, 2012 and in the US on January 31, 2012. In its first week on sale in the US, it made Billboard's Top Current albums in all genres, and reached No. 2 on the Billboard Classical Chart. The San Francisco Chronicle describes Simone's interpretations as "eloquent and fine" and her playing as having "stately beauty."

The album 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.

Simone says of her new album, and its title, "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 Trees by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Original artwork copyright Simon Dinnerstein.
Photos of Simone Dinnerstein by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco.
Photos of Simone Dinnerstein at the piano courtesy of Telarc.