Jonathan Biss

Jonathan Biss is an internationally famous pianist, who has channelled his musical curiosity into numerous performances, studies and educational projects. For 15 years he has been co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music Festival, alongside Mitsuko Uchida.
He has performed with leading orchestras worldwide, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestras of Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.
In the 2022/23 season he gave recitals in Cologne, New York and Philadelphia, and performed Beethoven trios with Midori and Antoine Lederlin in cities including Cologne, Hamburg, London and Tokyo. He appeared as a soloist with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Symphony Orchestra and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and also performed with the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
Jonathan Biss is one of the leading Beethoven interpreters. In the Beethoven anniversary year in 2020 he concluded a multi-year research project that included concert series, writings and the recording of all Beethoven’s piano sonatas. He offered introductions to all 32 of these works in Coursera’s online lecture course Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas.
He instigated the commissioning project Beethoven / 5 with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, for the promotion of new music. Five composers were each asked to write a work in reaction to a Beethoven piano concerto. The most recent was Brett Dean’s Gneixendorfer Musik – Eine Winterreise, which Jonathan Biss performed alongside Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. The other commissioned works were Caroline Shaw’s Watermark, Timo Andres’s The Blind Banister, Sally Beamish’s City Stanzas and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Il sogno di Stradella.
Jonathan Biss has won awards including the Leonard Bernstein Award of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award and the Gilmore Young Artist Award. His recordings for EMI have won a Diapason d’Or and an Edison Klassiek Award. He was an artist in residence with American Public Media’s Performance Today and was the first American to be selected as a BBC New Generation Artist. Jonathan Biss comes from a family of musicians, and studied at Indiana University and the Curtis Institute of Music.
He is the author of several audio and e-books, including Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven.