“There seems to be some type of abstract and timeless quality to Bach’s writing that lends itself to being heard in a multiplicity of ways,” the US pianist Simone Dinnerstein tells Apple Music Classical, about a composer whose music has been arranged and transcribed more than any other in history. Dinnerstein’s album Complicité, also featuring string ensemble Baroklyn, oboe d’amore player Peggy Pearson, and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, serves up a handful of the Baroque composer’s works in inventive and engaging new versions, each with the modern piano at its core. She begins her program with a short piece from the Orgelbüchlein, Bach’s incomplete collection of organ chorale preludes mapped to the liturgical year. Composed for Candlemas, a feast marking 40 days since the birth of Christ, “Herr Gott, nun schleuss den Himmel auf” pitches a chorale theme over a running accompaniment and a steady, pulsing bass. Listeners might expect the piano to take the chorale theme, with strings rippling underneath, yet Dinnerstein challenges these preconceptions: the piano provides the essential beating heart, giving this brief, lesser-known work a radiant modern flavor. “I was very interested in how the mood of the music could shift quite strikingly depending on how we arranged the textures,” says Dinnerstein. And by manipulating tempo and articulation, she adds, the many layers in Bach’s music reveal themselves in ever stronger ways: “The guiding principle is that I want to be able to hear all of the fascinating and expressive details in the music.” For Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 2, Dinnerstein and Baroklyn simply facilitate and highlight its many contrapuntal and textural details. “The work is highly contrapuntal, and at times downright odd,” says Dinnerstein. “We rehearsed a great deal to find all of those oddities and enhance them in the balance of the voices. In the second movement, there is an extended period when the upper strings are playing a pizzicato response to the piano’s ‘arioso’ line. The musicians were so finely attuned to me that I could be utterly in the moment, almost like an improviser, and they would be right at my side.” The cantata Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170, starring Jennifer Johnson Cano as Bach’s alto soloist, forms Complicité’s beating heart. First performed in Leipzig in 1726 for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity (towards the end of July), the expressive music is ripe for reinvention. “I commissioned [composer and pianist] Philip Lasser to compose a continuo realization for me of the first movement,” says Dinnerstein. “I love how he brought a contemporary element to that movement, which at times almost reminds me of the very best of Stephen Sondheim.” You can hear Lasser’s ingenious, improvisatory approach to Bach’s continuo lines in the final track, In the Air, based on the well-known “Air on the G String” from the Orchestral Suite No. 3. “I wanted the strings to bring a heavenly, pure quality to Bach’s original music alongside the piano and bass which possess a depth of sound that is of our world,” says Dinnerstein. “In the recording session, the first violins clustered in a triangle around one mic, almost like folk singers, that resulted in such a beautiful melding of sound.”