Simone Dinnerstein has toured the world as a concert pianist, performing in solo recitals and with top-flight orchestras, premiering new works and even touring the U.S. with a Cuban orchestra. Her new album, Complicité, features her Baroklyn chamber music ensemble.
But she struggled for decades with performance anxiety, despite hours of preparation. Onstage panic attacks crippled her confidence. She was worried about the expectation — especially in classical music — for soloists to perform from memory, without sheet music.
"I would suddenly lose where I was and get confused and then it became an anxiety that that would happen," Dinnerstein tells Morning Edition host Leila Fadel during a visit to NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C.
She had slips during her Carnegie Hall debut in 2005 — playing Bach's Goldberg Variations — months after she'd recorded the piece. The recording, which brings out the more meditative qualities of the variations, was picked up by the Telarc label and landed on top of the U.S. Billboard Classical Chart in the first week of sales in 2007, shooting Dinnerstein to fame.
"It got worse and worse and culminated in a concert where it just went so badly that afterward I was talking to my husband about it and he was like, 'you should just quit,'" Dinnerstein recalled about her anxiety and memory lapses. "I realized that either I was going to have to quit or I was going to have to perform with the music."
Hours of practice a day and hundreds or thousands more ahead of a concert couldn't overcome the panic and anxiety she felt around a performance.
"All of this was tied to this very conservative notion and convention that we have in classical music that pianists should play without the music, from memory," Dinnerstein said. "It also robbed me of the joy of being in the moment and thinking about the music itself."
Now the pianist is breaking her silence on her predicament, and how she ultimately overcame it, in the hope that it might help others and soften what she calls "rigid" classical music conventions.
"Performance anxiety is something that we performers often find quite shameful," she explains. "What I really hope will change is that we will become much more accepting of the fact that people have different learning styles and different different needs, just as we've become more aware of that in the workplace."
In recent years, Dinnerstein has brought a tablet on stage with her. She credits the device with saving her career.
Musicians tend to use the iPad Pro, which has a larger screen closer in size to sheet music, and turn the pages using a Bluetooth pedal so they can have full use of their hands and perform without a page turner for scores that can easily fill a hundred pages.
Dinnerstein still memorizes all her music for performances, but finds the simple presence of the score in front of her "enormously freeing and comforting."
The goal, according to Dinnerstein, should be to achieve something imaginative, thoughtful and exciting.
"If that could become part of the culture of classical music, that would be terrific, as opposed to it being about conventions," she says. "Like everybody has to wear black or white in orchestras. It doesn't have anything to do with the music. And it's so old fashioned."
Dinnerstein began using the iPad on stage in 2017, when she premiered the Piano Concerto No. 3 by Philip Glass, who composed it for her. Later that year, she formed Baroklyn, the chamber music group she leads from the keyboard.
She said the timing was no coincidence.
"I started feeling much more creative and free," Dinnerstein says. "Once I started having that permission to use the music, I began being much more daring. I had more time and mental space and emotional energy."
She puts some of that to work in Complicité, Baroklyn's all-Bach album of transcriptions and other arrangements. Rather than keep a consistent pulse from beginning to end in the prelude Herr Gott, nun schleuss den Himmel, BWV 617 (Lord God, now open the heavens), the group gradually speeds up the tempo throughout the four-minute piece. "I love that there's a sense of a stone rolling down a hill," Dinnerstein says.
In the third movement of the cantata Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170 (Contented peace, beloved delight of the soul), the violin and violas play in unison and pass the melody around to one another.
"It's like a sharing circle," Dinnerstein explains "And you hear everybody's individuality, their individual sound as it gets passed around. So we do things like that which are just experimental in terms of how we think about collaborating."
And Dinnerstein can now take that experimental approach on stage thanks to a simple device that may challenge some traditions but allows her to fulfill her artistic vision with ease.
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer. The digital version was edited by Tom Huizenga.
Copyright 2025 NPR
