Jonathan Biss performs Beethoven, Schumann, Schönberg and Berg

Jonathan Biss is one of the world’s finest young pianists. Since his debut recital in 2000, he has performed with the likes of the Royal Concertgebouw, the London Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. Individual musicians of the very highest calibre have played alongside him including Midori, Mitsuko Uchida and Kim Kashkashian . This March, in a rare evening away from his teaching post at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, Biss returns to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to perform masterworks by four of his favourite composers.

Arnold Schønberg and Alban Berg revolutionized classical music at the turn of the twentieth-century. Berg’s Piano Sonata (1909), composed while he was a student into Schoenberg, is one his most emotionally passionate works. Taking the form of a single movement that contains within it the traditional structure of the sonata, the whole piece emerges from a single idea in the first bars. Although not completely atonal, it feels constantly on the verge of fragmentation.

Schönberg’s Six Little Pieces for Piano(1913) are each under a minute in length, and burst at the seams with invention. Each miniature carries within it the seeds of a large-scale work. Written a few years after his rejection of late romantic excess for the sake of modernist asperity, they are one of Schoenberg’s first explorations of atonalism.

The piano music of Robert Schumann looms particularly large in Biss’ recorded output, and forms the bedrock of his reputation. Waldszenen (1848-49) shows the great romantic at his most playful. A collection of nine short pieces depicting different aspects of a wood, the Waldszenen are dense and varied, ranging from austere, delicate melodies to virtuoso rhythmic flurries.

The recital will close with two piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven, whose cycle of thirty-two is often considered the peak of the genre. Sonata No. 25(1809) is amongst the shortest, and one of the most joyful – after an ecstatic first movement, there comes a gently sublime andante and a dance-like rondo. Sonata No. 23(1804-5), often known as the Appassionata, is one of his most tempestuous. Over three dramatic movements, it requires a truly virtuosic pianist to capture its emotive intensity. Opening with a foreboding arpeggio, it balances celestial grace with outbursts of frenzied activity, often in the same few bars. The final movement is one of the most kinetic in the entire classical repertoire.