Complicité
Artist: Simone Dinnerstein, Baroklyn, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Peggy Pearson
Release Date: May 30, 2025
Label: Supertrain Records
Producer: Silas Brown
Complicité is a term that I first heard from my son, who studied the teachings of the French theatre practitioner, Jacques Lecoq. Three important ideas that Lecoq communicated to his students were le jeu (playfulness), complicité (togetherness), and disponsibilité (openness). I was so intrigued by these ideas, and the different exercises that my son learned in order to cultivate these skills within ensemble acting, that I decided to try a Lecoq approach with my own musical ensemble, Baroklyn.
Baroklyn is a string ensemble that I direct from the keyboard. All of the musicians are wonderful collaborators, with years of experience playing chamber music. They are able to listen to how I imagine each piece of music and to use all of their own creativity to help bring that vision to life. Another aspect of the Lecoq approach is that it cannot be rushed. We are lucky enough to have plenty of rehearsal time, which enables us to explore many different ways of playing.
I’m very interested in irregularities within Bach’s music. There is so much variation in his writing, and each voice is saying something slightly different, yet all of the voices are speaking simultaneously. It is dense music to play and dense to hear. My biggest goal is to be able to communicate and hear those different voices, through differentiation of timbre, agogic distortion of rhythms, ebb and flow of tempo, and emphasis on the moments of expressive intervallic leaps and harmonic dissonances that jump out from the page.