Jonathan Biss’ Front Row Premium Recital

Jonathan Biss playing Beethoven in Benjamin Franklin Hall (screen shot from the video being discussed)

This afternoon I returned to the Front Row Web site created by San Francisco Performances (SFP) after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic to provide a platform for streamed performances by artists that have previously presented recitals under SFP auspices. This was my second encounter with a performance in the Front Row Premium Series, the first having been a 35-minute recital by pianist Timo Andres entitled Pithy Program. Today’s encounter was with Jonathan Biss, who had prepared a one-hour program of three piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven: Opus 7 sonata in E-flat major, Opus 78 in F-sharp major, given the nickname “à Thérèse” because it was written for the Hungarian Countess Therese Brunsvik, and the second of the “big three” final sonatas, Opus 110 in A-flat major. The program was captured on video this past November 24 in the Benjamin Franklin Hall of the American Philosophical Society building in Philadelphia, located a few blocks east of the historic Independence Hall. This is the venue for performances by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

I have SFP to thank for my last encounter with Biss playing Beethoven. He was one of the artists celebrating the nonagenarian status of pianist Leon Fleisher, who had been Biss’ teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. On that occasion Biss played Opus 110’s predecessor in the “big three,” Opus 109 in E major.

I must confess that I was not particularly satisfied with that occasion. Biss has put a lot of time into preparing performances of Beethoven sonatas, and it would not surprise me if he has internalized the specifics of every detail on the score pages of those 32 sonatas. The problem is that, while he seems to be able to provide the attentive listener with every last one of those details, he never make a case for how interpretation will relate all of those parts to a well-integrated sense of the whole. Put another way, Biss knows how to endow every last moment with its own sense of significance; but he never makes a case for there being a coherent journey through all those moments, whether in an individual movement or in the entire sonata.

That said, the video document of Biss’ Benjamin Franklin Hall performance offers the viewer considerable insight when it comes to how Biss treats each of those moments. One can definitely appreciate what is probably an intentional coordination between keyboard technique and body language; and, more often than not, such an appreciation is jaw-dropping in nature. If only there were equally jaw-dropping moments when the listener could appreciate how all those moments came together to realize a coherent “sonata experience,” let alone how that experience evolves from the “early” perspective of Opus 7 through the “middle period” rhetoric of Opus 78 to the many different techniques in Opus 110 through which Beethoven breaks with just about every preceding approach to a piano sonata.