Pianist Jonathan Biss Signs with Colbert Artists

Jonathan Biss joins pianists such as Orli Shahm, Ran Dank, Marc-André Hamelin, and Soyeon Kate Lee on the roster of Colbert Artists Management.

Biss has appeared as a soloist with some of the world’s foremost orchestras, including the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, Boston Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw, and the London Symphony, amongst others.

Since 2018, he has served as the Co-Artistic Director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival alongside pianist Mitsuko Uchida. He previously served as 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.

As an educator, he was 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. He has published four books, and in the latest one,  ‘Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven’, he examines music and his own life’s journey through the lens of  Beethoven’s last piano sonatas.

His relationship with Beethoven's music was furthered when he embarked on a groundbreaking journey with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in 2015, launching the Beethoven/5 commissioning project. The project yielded a collection of five new piano concerti, each written by a distinguished composer in response to one of Beethoven’s iconic works. Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020, Biss recorded the composer’s complete piano sonatas, and offered insights into all 32 landmark works via his free, online Coursera lecture series "Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas."

Biss has received 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.

The pianist grew up in a family of musicians:  his grandmother is Raya Garbousova, one of the first famous female cellists, and his parents are violinist Miriam Fried and violist/violinist Paul Biss. He studied with Evelyne Brancart at  Indiana University and Leon Fleisher at the Curtis Institute of Music.