Concert Review: Pianist Jonathan Biss — Masterful Performances of Schubert

By Susan Miron

Rockport Chamber Music Festival is in the midst of a stellar season. Saturday evening, the brilliant pianist (and writer) Jonathan Biss gave a sensational recital of two late Schubert sonatas—a music lover’s dream.

Pianist Jonathan Biss. Photo: Benjamin Ealovega

Several years ago, the great pianist Leon Fleisher gave a truly memorable performance of the famed B-flat Sonata of Schubert. Several of his renowned students, including pianist Jonathan Biss, also played on this concert. Many great pianists have championed this last, magnificent sonata “of heavenly length” (as composer Robert Schumann put it), and on Saturday evening it was Biss’s turn to play it, along with the penultimate Schubert sonata in A Major. It was an occasion I wager few of us present will ever forget.

Co-Director of the prestigious Marlboro Music Festival, where he has spent 15 years, Biss has enjoyed an international performing and teaching career, and, interestingly, joins a select roster of pianists who also write extremely well—the late Alfred Brendel, Jeremy Denk, the late Charles Rosen, and Stephen Hough.

Schubert’s last three piano sonatas, all written in his final year, prompt comparisons with Beethoven’s last works (Opus 109, 110, 111) in the genre. As Ernest Porter puts it, they are “final pronouncements of great minds.” “The sense of finality,” Porter continued, “is with us who cannot imagine any greater succeeding works and who perceive in these a summation of the composer’s output.” Biss, in a recent NY Times piece, wrote:

When you play or listen to them, the sense of leave-taking and the sorrow that accompanies it becomes an almost physical presence in the room. Scholars have debated whether Schubert knew he was so near to death when he wrote these works. To my ear, it is unthinkable that they could spring from the imagination of a person anticipating a future.

I recall hearing and being extremely affected by Biss playing Mozart at Marlboro a decade ago, and continue to be impressed with each hearing (and reading). I’ve heard him play solo recitals and, most recently, the Schumann Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which I thought was the most moving performance of this piece I had ever heard.

The superb acoustics at Shalin Liu hall allowed one to hear both Biss’s impeccable voicing and Schubert’s harmonies with remarkable clarity. Throughout, the pianist sustained an unusually beautiful tone, his left hand often sounding like a really good tenor or baritone, his right hand the sound of dulcet pearls. A deeply thoughtful musician, Biss made each note, measure, and phrase count. The stormy parts were mightily powerful, the gentler parts often reminding one of tender love letters. Biss sailed through the many super-virtuosic passages with aplomb. I noticed that the audience was paying rapt attention: no fidgeting or coughing or looking at the program booklet. We were all under Schubert’s and Biss’s spell.

The program opened with Schubert’s four-movement Sonata in A Major, D. 959 (1828), which is full of mercurial mood shifts. Biss describes it poetically:

Between anger and acceptance comes grandeur, ambivalence, fever, heart-stopping tenderness, defiance, longing. Schubert’s Sonata in A Major, D. 959, is a complicated, unsettling miracle of a work… Its greatness and power are a function of its ambiguity, which is expressed in so many ways—in its huge range of character, its structural integrity and breadth, its constant transformation of its material. The A Major Sonata is a work that tells you what truth is, then suggests that truth itself is an illusion.

The second movement, Andantino, is languorous, tormented, bleak. Its middle section was described by (the late pianist) Alfred Brendel as “among the most daring and terrifying pages in all of music,” likening it to Goya’s war paintings. (Goya and Schubert were both born in the same year, 1828.) The composer continues through these last sonatas to plunge listners into darkness, then to let up on the intensity so we can encounter the light and, perhaps, smile again.

Biss did a masterful job of making the last, great B-flat Sonata his own. I look forward to his recording of the three late sonatas: his range of dynamics, from thundering to whispering, his uncanny sense of Schubert’s timing, and his exquisite touch gave this adoring audience an unvarnished look into Schubert’s world of loneliness, passion, heartbreak, and musical magic.


Susan Miron, a harpist, has been a book reviewer for over 30 years for a large variety of literary publications and newspapers. Her fields of expertise were East and Central European, Irish, and Israeli literature. Susan covers classical music for the Arts Fuse and the Boston Musical Intelligencer.

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