1. Jonathan Biss is the co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music Festival.
22 Facts About Jonathan Biss
1. 2.
Jonathan Biss started learning the piano at age six, studying with Karen Taylor and Evelyne Brancart at Indiana University Bloomington's Jacobs School of Music, where both his parents taught violin.
3.
At 17, Jonathan Biss entered the Curtis Institute of Music to study with Leon Fleisher.
4.
Jonathan Biss 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.
5.
Jonathan Biss made his recital debut at Carnegie Hall in January 2011.
6.
Jonathan Biss has appeared with the foremost US orchestras, including the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics; the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies; and the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras.
7.
Jonathan 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.
8.
An enthusiastic performer of chamber music, Jonathan Biss has appeared with renowned artists such as Uchida, Fleisher, Richard Goode, Midori, and Kim Kashkashian.
9.
In 2010, Jonathan Biss was appointed to the piano faculty as Neubauer Family Chair at his alma mater, the Curtis Institute of Music.
10.
Jonathan Biss will continue to add lectures until he covers all the sonatas.
11.
Jonathan Biss was the first classical musician to be commissioned to write a Kindle eBook.
12.
Jonathan Biss released an album of Schumann and Dvorak with Elias String Quartet.
13.
Jonathan Biss 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.
14.
Jonathan Biss has premiered a piano quintet by William Bolcom.
15.
Jonathan 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.
16.
Jonathan Biss has put together several programs of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Elgar, Gesualdo, Kurtag, 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.
17.
Jonathan Biss gave masterclasses at Carnegie Hall in connection with the idea of late style and published Coda, a Kindle single on the topic, in 2017.
18.
In 2018, Marlboro Music announced that Jonathan Biss would assume the role of co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont.
19.
Jonathan Biss has a long connection with Marlboro, where he spent 12 summers as both a junior and senior participant.
20.
In 2020 Jonathan Biss performed a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR, the United States' National Public Radio.
21.
Jonathan Biss is married to Christopher Jonathan Biss-Brown, curator of the Children's Literature Research Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
22.
Jonathan Biss has openly discussed his struggles with anxiety and the effects performance has on his mental health.