Jonathan Biss - Career

Career

The 2000-2001 season witnessed Jonathan Biss make his New York recital debut at the 92nd Street Y and his New York Philharmonic debut under Kurt Masur. His European career was launched in 2002 when he became the first American to be selected as a BBC New Generation Artist, winning a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award the following year. He made his recital debut at Carnegie Hall in January 2011.Biss has appeared with every major U.S. orchestra, including the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics; the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies, and the Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Metropolitan Opera Orchestras. Biss is a frequent guest soloist in Europe where he has appeared with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Staatskapelle Berlin, Staatskapelle Dresden, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. In addition to his concert and solo performances, he is active in chamber music and appears regularly with renowned artists such as the pianists Mitsuko Uchida, Leon Fleisher, and Richard Goode, violinist Midori and violist Kim Kashkashian.

In 2010, Biss returned to his alma mater to be appointed to the piano faculty as Neubauer Family Foundation Chair. Having previously conducted regular masterclasses at the Curtis Institute, this appointment allows him to continue the chain of mentorship that he himself received from Leon Fleisher.

In 2011, on Beethoven's birthday - 16 December, with the release of his eBook Beethoven’s Shadow, a 19,000 word a meditation on the art of performing Beethoven’s piano sonatas, Jonathan Biss became the first classical musician to be commissioned to write a Kindle eBook. Shortly after in January 2012, the record label Onyx released the first of Jonathan Biss’ recordings of the complete Beethoven Sonatas. Beethoven Sonatas Volume 1, the first of nine discs to be released over as many years, featured four sonatas - Op. 10 No. 1 in C minor, Op. 22 in B flat major, Op. 26 in A flat major, and Op. 81a in E flat major (Les Adieux).

Biss announced in an interview with Musical Toronto that his 2012 - 2013 season would be largely dedicated to the music of Robert Schumann, declaring himself to be "a fanatic for every note Schumann wrote". Biss has curated a series of concerts under the title Schumann: Under the Influence with the intention of re-evaluating the composer's legacy, acknowledging in a radio interview that "people have often shown impatience with Schumann's meanderings," to which he rejoinders - "What a great pity. For Schumann's wanderings lead us to emotional spaces we don't normally dare to go, for fear that we may never find our way back." The concert series places Schumann in a lineage that reaches back past Mozart and Beethoven to Purcell, and trajects forward to Leoš Janáček, Alban Berg and contemporary composers György Kurtág and Timothy Andres.