“This month, the Havana Lyceum Orchestra, a group of gifted young musicians from Cuba, will … play 10 concerts with the Brooklyn-based pianist Simone Dinnerstein, who recruited them for her just-released ‘Mozart in Havana’ album,” writes Geoff Edgers in Thursday’s (6/8) Washington Post. “It may seem an unlikely collaboration: a group of unpaid musicians on a largely isolated island and an accomplished pianist from hipster-soaked Park Slope who doesn’t speak more than a few words of Spanish. In reality, the Mozart project makes perfect sense.” When Dinnerstein was growing up in Brooklyn, “Her parents drained their savings to buy a piano from a shuttered nightclub for $4,000…. Everybody in the orchestra works for free. The conductor [José Antonio Méndez Padrón] gets by on about $55 a month.” Dinnerstein’s former teacher, Solomon Mikowsky, 81, “recruited a group of his former students, including Dinnerstein, to perform at the piano festival he started in Havana. In 2015, she was paired with Padrón and the 45-member Lyceum Orchestra…. Recording at the Lyceum’s home, the Oratorio de San Felipe Neri church, … ‘Over three nights, they captured the collaboration on ‘Mozart in Havana’ and will bring that music to the States this month.”
Posted June 13, 2017
