Jonathan Biss, classical review: Thinking pianist is a master of mood

Jonathan Biss is a thinking pianist, and his recital under the heading “Late Style” yielded rich rewards. In fact, Late Style proved a flexible concept: Chopin and Schumann died young (39 and 46 respectively), while György Kurtág, now aged 91, is still composing. As Biss quipped, the pieces he played, written when the composer was in his 70s, may eventually be considered middle-period Kurtág.

Only his chosen Brahms pieces could definitively be considered late. Even then, Biss played part of his early Third Piano Sonata, because it pre-echoed the opening of the Opus 119 Piano Pieces, the last things Brahms wrote for the piano and, like their Opus 118 companions, anything but valedictory.

Biss was thoroughly inside the shifting moods: easeful or sombre, naturally conversational in the second movement of Opus 118, mischievous, almost reckless in the Rhapsody that closes Opus 119.

Earlier, in Schumann’s Songs of the Dawn, Biss’s phrasing at first seemed cluttered, lacking in flow, but he soon settled, allowing the music’s restive undercurrents to surface and then fall away.

In Kurtág’s concentrated miniatures – six of them, lasting barely 10 minutes, from the immense sequence Kurtág calls Játékok (Games) – Biss showed an unusually rich tonal palette, revealing fleeting glimpses, emotionally precise, of distant worlds of possibility. Almost without a pause, he shattered the mood with Chopin’s mighty Polonaise-Fantaisie, played with an intensity that verged on the neurotic.