Jonathan Biss • piano
Jonathan Biss photo by Benjamin Ealovega.
“Schönberg and Berg wrote these works nearly a century after Schubert wrote his B flat sonata. They inhabited different worlds and had very distinct lives and problems. And yet they all manage to convey the beauty and pain of being human. It is impossible to listen to them without having a bit of one’s empathy awakened. Therefore, they feel very appropriate to perform for the Terezin Music Foundation, which in addition to memory, is all about empathy — about not forgetting to look, and listen, to our fellow human beings.”
— Jonathan Biss |
Jonathan Biss is a world-renowned pianist who shares his deep musical curiosity in the concert hall and beyond. Besides performing with leading orchestras, he is devoted to his work as a teacher, musical thinker and one of the great Beethoven interpreters of our time. He is currently Co-Artistic Director with Mitsuko Uchida at the Marlboro Music Festival, where he has spent fourteen summers. He also led a Coursera online course that reached more than 150,000 people internationally. Mr. Biss writes extensively on his repertoire and has authored four audio- and e- books, including Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven, Audible’s first Original by a classical musician and one of its top audiobooks of 2020.
His 2022-23 season includes solo recitals in Cologne, in Santa Monica, for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and at the Town Hall in New York City; an international tour with violinist Midori and cellist Antoine Lederlin with performances in Cologne, Engardin, Hamburg, London’s Wigmore Hall and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall; performances with the Melbourne Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and the U.S. premiere of Brett Dean’s Piano Concerto Gneixendorfer Musik–Eine Winterreise (part of Mr. Biss’s Beethoven/5 commissioning project) paired with Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 performed with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Raised in a musical family, Mr. Biss began playing piano at age six and went on to study with Evelyne Brancart at Indiana University and Leon Fleisher at the Curtis Institute of Music. He was a Curtis faculty member for ten years. |
