Jonathan Biss
Jonathan Biss (born September 18, 1980) is an American pianist, teacher, and writer based in Philadelphia. He is the co-artistic director (with Mitsuko Uchida) of the Marlboro Music Festival. Early life and education
Biss was born into a family of musicians in Bloomington, Indiana. His paternal step-grandmother was one of the first well-known female cellists, the Russian cellist Raya Garbousova, for whom Samuel Barber wrote his cello concerto. His parents, Miriam Fried and Paul Biss, are both violinists. His older brother Daniel is a politician serving as the mayor of Evanston, Illinois. After studying at Indiana University, where both his parents taught, Biss entered the Curtis Institute of Music at age 17 to study with Leon Fleisher. Interviewed by The New York Times in 2011 in the run-up to Biss's Carnegie Hall debut recital, Fleisher said of his pupil:

<blockquote>His ability and interest go for things of transcendence and sublimeness. That made a great impression on me. He took a very healthy road that started with chamber music, both with his mother and then more extensively at places like Ravinia and Marlboro, and he got to be known by the elders in the profession as somebody to look out for.</blockquote>

Career
Biss made his New York recital debut in 2000 at the 92nd Street Y. In early 2001, he performed with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of 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. He has appeared with the foremost U.S. orchestras, including the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics; the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies; and the Cleveland and Philadelphia 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. An enthusiastic performer of chamber music, Biss has appeared with renowned artists such as Uchida, Fleisher, Richard Goode, Midori, and Kim Kashkashian. In 2010, Biss was appointed to the piano faculty as Neubauer Family Chair at his alma mater, the Curtis Institute of Music. As part of his teaching career, Biss became the first classical musician to partner with Coursera. Together they created Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, a free video course on several of Beethoven's most famous sonatas. The course has reached more than 150,000 students in more than 185 countries. He will continue to add lectures until he covers all the sonatas. Throughout his career, Biss has been particularly noted for his immersive focus on single composers. In 2011, on Beethoven's birthday, he released the eBook Beethoven's Shadow, a 19,000-word meditation on the art of performing Beethoven's piano sonatas. Biss was the first classical musician to be commissioned to write a Kindle eBook. In January 2012, the record label Onyx released the first of Biss's recordings of Beethoven's piano sonatas. It was the first of nine discs to be released over as many years. Biss dedicated his 2012–13 season to Robert Schumann, declaring himself "a fanatic for every note Schumann wrote." The project was titled "Schumann: Under the Influence" and explored Schumann's influences and his legacy. Biss performed a series of concerts internationally with pieces by Schumann's predecessors such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Purcell, and composers who have been influenced by his music such as Leoš Janáček, Alban Berg and contemporary composers György Kurtág and Timo Andres. As part of the project, Biss wrote the Kindle Single eBook A Pianist Under the Influence. The work explains Biss's lifelong, intense, multi-layered relationship with Schumann's music and was excerpted in Slate. Biss also released an album of Schumann and Dvořák with Elias String Quartet. Biss is also an advocate for new music. He has commissioned pieces including Lunaire Variations by David Ludwig, Interlude II by Leon Kirchner, Wonderer by Lewis Spratlan, and Three Pieces for Piano and a concerto by Bernard Rands, which he premiered with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He has also premiered a piano quintet by William Bolcom. In 2016 Biss launched Beethoven/5, for which the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is commissioning five composers to write new piano concertos, each inspired by one of Beethoven's five piano concertos. Biss premiered "The Blind Banister" by Timo Andres, which was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music, "City Stanzas" by Sally Beamish, Il sogno di Stradella by Salvatore Sciarrino, "Watermark" by Caroline Shaw, and Gneixendorfer Musik - eine Winterreise by Brett Dean. Biss has begun examining, both in concert and academically, the concept of a composer's "late style", focusing on musicians who went in surprising directions at the ends of their lives. He has put together several programs of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Elgar, Gesualdo, Kurtág, Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann's later works, which he performed with the Brentano Quartet and Mark Padmore in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, and across the United States. He also gave masterclasses at Carnegie Hall in connection with the idea of late style and published Coda, a Kindle single on the topic, in 2017. In 2018, Marlboro Music announced that Biss would assume the role of co-artistic director (with Mitsuko Uchida) of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. Biss has a long connection with Marlboro, where he spent 12 summers as both a junior and senior participant. Starting in September 2019, in the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth in December 2020, Biss performed a whole season focused around Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, with more than 50 recitals worldwide. This included the complete sonatas at the Wigmore Hall and Berkeley, multi-concert-series in Washington, Philadelphia and Seattle, and recitals in Rome, Budapest, New York and Sydney. In 2020 Biss performed a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR, the United States' National Public Radio. The same year, he released Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven, as part of Audible's Words+Music series. The audio-memoir discusses Biss's struggles with anxiety and the effects performance had on his mental health. Unquiet was listed as the one of the platform's Top Ten Audiobooks the week it was released. Biss expanded upon the topic as part of a web-documentary series. Beginning in September 2021, Biss joined the New England Conservatory of Music as a guest lecturer. He is joined by composer and pianist Marc-André Hamelin. Awards
 1997: Wolf Trap's Shouse Debut Artist award
 1999: Avery Fisher Career Grant
 2002: Lincoln Center's Martin E. Segal Award
 2002: Gilmore Young Artist Award
 2003: Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award
 2002–2004: member of BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme
 2005: Leonard Bernstein Award

RecordingsComplete Piano Sonatas, Jonathan Biss, 2020Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 9 - Nos. 7, 18, 32, Jonathan Biss, 2019Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 8 - Nos. 8 (Pathétique), 10, 22, 31, Jonathan Biss, 2019Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 7 - Nos. 2, 20, 17 (The Tempest), 30, Jonathan Biss, 2018Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 6 – Nos. 9, 13 & 29 (Hammerklavier), Jonathan Biss, 2017
 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 5 – Nos. 3, 25, 27 and 28, Jonathan Biss, 2016
 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 4 – Nos. 1, 6, 19 and 23 (Appassionata), Jonathan Biss, 2015
 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 3 – Nos. 15 (Pastoral), 16 & 21 (Waldstein), Jonathan Biss, Onyx Classics, 2014
 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 2 – Nos. 4, 14 (Moonlight) & 24, (A Thérèse), Jonathan Biss, Onyx Classics, 2013
 Schumann: Piano Quintet; Dvorak: Piano Quintet No.2, Jonathan Biss and Elias Quartet, Onyx Classics, 2012
 Beethoven Sonatas Vol. 1 – Nos. 5, 11, 12 (Funeral March) & 26 (Les Adieux), Jonathan Biss, Onyx Classics, 2012 
 Schubert: Piano Sonata in A Major D959; Piano Sonata in C Major 'Reliquie' D840; and two Kurtág Piano Miniatures, Jonathan Biss, Live From Wigmore Hall, WHLive0030, 2009
 Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 21 & 22, Jonathan Biss and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, EMI Classics, 2008
 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, Jonathan Biss, EMI Classics, 2007
 Schumann Recital – Fantasie, Kreisleriana & Arabeske, Jonathan Biss, EMI Classics, 2007
 Beethoven, Schumann: Piano Works'', Jonathan Biss, EMI Classics, 2004

Bibliography

References

External links
 Jonathan Biss Official website

1980 births
Living people
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Jewish American classical musicians
Curtis Institute of Music alumni
Indiana University alumni
Jewish classical pianists
BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists
21st-century classical pianists
21st-century American Jews