Jonathan Biss

If you keep up with the biographies of the youngest generation of pianists, you'll undoubtedly have noticed that the age at which they start giving concerts is constantly going down. The American pianist Jonathan Biss in fact made his debut at the Carnegie Hall even before his birth, as his mother - a top violinist - was pregnant with him at the time. The music gene soon had him in its thrall and in no time at all after his studies with piano guru Leon Fleischer he was among the top ten pianists of his generation. Biss has recently begun to record the complete sonatas of Beethoven. During this concert, he gives us a foretaste of the finished result, with the well-known 'Moonlight Sonata'. It is only the great pianists who are able to voice the endless, subtle pianissimo shifts in the melancholy melody and to bring out the magical harmonies. Only then can one understand Rellstab's poetic comparison with the night world of the Vierwaldstädter See and Berlioz's recollection of the sunset in Campania. For his part, Beethoven called it a 'Sonata quasi una fantasia'. This was a new, freer approach to the sonata form, with improvisatory features, and it was entirely in this spirit that Schumann composed his Fantasy in C. In the first section, Schumann weaves in a quotation from a Beethoven song 'Nimm sie hin denn meine Lieder' as a tribute to his illustrious predecessor.