Jonathan Biss

Pianist Jonathan Biss is recognized globally for his “impeccable taste and a formidable technique” (The New Yorker). Praised by The Boston Globe as “an eloquent and insightful music writer,” Biss published his fourth book, Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven, in 2020. The book was the first Audible Original by a classical musician and one of Audible’s top audiobooks of the year.

Throughout the 2025–26 season, Biss appears widely in recital, chamber music, and concerto engagements across the United States and Europe. Abroad, he presents Beethoven’s last three sonatas at Musikkens Hus in Aalborg, Denmark, and at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées before making his much-anticpated return to Wigmore Hall in London with a program of Mozart, Janáček, and Schumann. In the United States, Biss joins the Louisville Orchestra and Teddy Abrams for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 and reunites with longtime collaborator the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra for a program pairing the works of Robert and Clara Schumann with Kurtag. He joins the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and Andreas Delfs for a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major and performs Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Boulder Philharmonic led by Michael Butterman and with the Bangor Symphony led by Lucas Richman.  Throughout the season, he performs Mozart’s violin sonatas with violinist Mark Steinberg, with engagements at Union College in Schenectady and at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center. In a residency at Indiana University’s Jacob’s School of Music, he presents Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas at Bloomington’s Auer Hall before joining the Indiana University Chamber Orchestra and conductor Jeffery Meyer for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 alongside Timo Andres’s The Blind Banister. Named the Kaufman Music Center’s 2025–26 Artist in Residence, Biss curates a series of programs including a performance lecture on Beethoven sonatas, a solo recital of works by Mendelssohn, Janáček, Kurtág, Schumann, and Amy Beth Kirsten, and a program spotlighting outstanding young pianists from the Center.

Biss has appeared as a soloist with some of the world’s foremost orchestras, including  the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Boston Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw, the London Symphony and more.  He has served as the Co-Artistic Director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival alongside pianist Mitsuko Uchida since 2018. He served on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music for ten years, and has been a guest professor at schools such as the Guildhall SOMAD and the New England Conservatory of Music. Biss is also the author of Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven, in which he examines music and his own life’s journey through the lens of Beethoven’s last piano sonatas.

In 2015, Biss embarked on a groundbreaking journey with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra through the Beethoven/5 commissioning project, which brought together five distinguished composers to create new piano concerti in response to Beethoven’s iconic works. The project has generated a series of recordings on Orchid Classics, beginning with 2024’s recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, the “Emperor,” paired with Brett Dean’s Gneixendorfermusik: Eine Winterreise, performed with the Swedish Radio Symphony under David Afkham. The series also features Sally Beamish’s City Stanzas alongside Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, with additional volumes showcasing new concerti by Timo Andres, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Caroline Shaw. The fifth and final volume will be released in the spring of 2026.

Over the course of his career, Biss has collaborated with a wide range of esteemed musicians, from Mark Padmore to Midori. In the 2024-25 season, Biss appeared with the Boston Symphony led by Xian Zhang, the BBC Symphony led by Jakub Hrusa, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra,  the San Diego Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Biss also joined the Doric String Quartet for dates in Denmark before going on to perform with Liza Ferschtman, Malin Broman, and Antoine Lederlin in Madrid, Helsinki, and throughout the Netherlands. An advocate of newly-commissioned works, Biss most recently collaborated with composers Alvin Singleton, Tysahwn Sorey, and Tyson Gholson Davis for his Schubert commissioning project, which he presented at the Frederic Chopin Society in St. Paul, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Meany Center in Washington and more.

Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020, Biss recorded the composer’s complete piano sonatas, and offered insights to all 32 landmark works via his free, online Coursera lecture series Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. In March 2020, Biss gave a virtual recital presented by 92NY, wherein he performed Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas for an online audience of more than 280,000 people. In 2024, Biss participated in Princeton University Concert’s Healing Through Music Series, appearing alongside author Adam Haslett for a panel discussion on anxiety, depression, and creativity. Throughout 2024 and 2025, Biss contributed a series of opinion pieces to The New York Times, with topics ranging from the harmful myth of the mad artist to finding solace in Schubert’s final piano sonatas and beyond.

Biss is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Leonard Bernstein Award, the Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, and a Gilmore Young Artist Award. His albums for EMI won the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and Edison awards. He was an artist-in-residence on American Public Media’s Performance Today and was the first American chosen to participate in the BBC’s New Generation Artist program.

Biss is a third-generation professional musician; his grandmother is Raya Garbousova, one of the first famous female cellists (for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto), and his parents are violinist Miriam Fried and violist/violinist Paul Biss. Growing up surrounded by music, Biss began his piano studies at age six, with his first musical collaborations alongside his mother and father. He studied with Evelyne Brancart at Indiana University and Leon Fleisher at the Curtis Institute of Music.