Ecstatic Living Room

In the midst of a cross-country U.S. recital tour (which includes an April 14 stop at Zankel Hall), Biss filled out our questionnaire- providing detailed answers and insights, some of which may surprise you. He wraps up his current traveling program April 20.
Since making his New York Philharmonic debut in 2001 when he was 21, Jonathan Biss’s international career has flourished through his orchestral, recital, and chamber music performances in North America, Europe, and Asia, and through his acclaimed EMI Classics recordings. Mr. Biss is a former student of Leon Fleisher at The Curtis Institute of Music and the third generation in a family of musicians that includes his grandmother, cellist Raya Garbousova, and his parents, violinist Miriam Fried and violist/violinist Paul Biss.

His diverse repertoire ranges from Mozart and Beethoven, through the Romantics to Janáček and Schoenberg as well as works by contemporary composers, including commissions from Leon Kirchner and Lewis Spratlan.

With a reputation for intriguing programs, artistic maturity and versatility, the 28-year-old American pianist has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2005 Leonard Bernstein Award and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award. Mr. Biss’s newest recording as an EMI Classics artist is a CD of Mozart Piano Concertos 21 and 22 with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Two previous recordings—all Beethoven and all-Schumann recitals—won an Edison Award and a Diapason d’Or Award, respectively. Mr. Biss blogs about his life as a musician at www.jonathanbiss.com.

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I’m probably the last person in the United States to see The Shawshank Redemption (I finally got around to Netflixing it, and watched it last night over my favorite meal – a plate of cheese ravioli with home made tomato sauce), but for me it was worth the wait. Obviously, it’s one of the most inspirational films ever made, but for a classical music lover it’s an especially heartening experience to hear music from a Mozart opera take center stage at one of the film’s key moments. Tim Robbins, playing the wrongfully convicted banker who refuses to have his spirit broken by prison life, has briefly barricaded himself in one of the prison offices and decides to treat his cellmates to some music over the Shawshank loudspeaker system. Sitting back in his chair, Robbins’s character, Andy Dufresne, sinks into reverie as Gundula Janowitz (The Countess) and Edith Mathis (Susanna) sing the Duettino (little duet) “Sull’Aria” (“on the breeze”) from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Andy gets time in solitary confinement for the infraction, but it’s a small price to pay for the transcendent moment he has given himself and his fellow inmates. His unlikely prison friend Red (played by Morgan Freeman) sums up the experience this way:

“I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.”

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Some music-loving friends find it corny (but that’s why it’s so much fun, of course) that I coordinate so much of my listening to the changing seasons. Part of the reason I do this is that my imagination makes certain connections early on and the rest of me just can’t let go. On balance, I think it’s a good thing because it prevents me from overdosing on some of my favorite works. For example, I can’t listen to Mahler’s Third Symphony until the first day of summer (more on that work in a future post); I save that same composer’s “Song of the Earth” until the fall because there are colors and shadows in this music that remind me of late afternoon autumn light. Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony, “Winter Dreams,” has helped me welcome in this most forbidding season each year since I first heard it in college (I’m not much of a winter person, so music definitely helps keep my spirits up until spring returns). When a conductor programs Tchaikovsky’s First or “Nuctracker” ballet in the summer I think, “Hey, what’s up with that?”

As is evidenced above, seasonal words sometimes sneak into the titles of certain works, but those aren’t the only works I connect with particular seasons. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony doesn’t have a seasonal subtitle or a nickname, but for me it’s definitely summer music, the slow movement passing like high clouds against a bright blue sky as you gaze at them from a hammock. Ravel’s Dapnhis and Chloe ballet is summer muic for me as well, conjuring up sunlit Greek Isles and brilliant white-sand beaches. On the other hand, Sibelius’s seven symphonies are mostly winter fare for me: I’m sure Finland (the composer’s homeland) has perfectly beautiful summers, but for me much of his music has a bracing, wintry quality that’s both awesome and imposing.

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One of today’s most eminent Schubert lieder interpreters, the English tenor’s newest album features the composer’s Schwanengesang song cycle. Bostridge generously took time to share some thoughts, favorites and opinions in this Q&A feature.

Ian Bostridge is widely acclaimed for his deeply expressive and intense performances on the opera stage, in the concert hall with the world’s leading orchestras, and in solo recitals.

The London native was a post-doctoral fellow in history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before embarking on a full-time career as a singer. His Oxford historical monograph, “Witchcraft and its Transformations 1650 to 1750,” was published in 1997.

Bostridge’s extensive discography, mostly for EMI Classics – with whom he records exclusively – includes many award-winners and Grammy nominations. His latest project, Schubert: Schwanengesang, was released on the label last month. Frequent collaborator Antonio Pappano serves as conductor/pianist.

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My name is Albert Imperato. I’m the founder and co-managing director of 21C Media Group, an independent public relations, marketing, and consulting firm specializing in classical music and the performing arts. I’ve been working in music promotion since 1987, and many of my friends and family are still very curious about what exactly I do for a living.“I promote classical music,” is my express answer, to which I get responses from the genuinely fascinated to the completely perplexed. Over time, though, these same friends and family members invariably come in contact with the music I am promoting, whether because I’ve played something for them on my stereo or iPod, given them a CD to try out, or actually take one of them to a concert or an opera. For the most part, these people find themselves intrigued by their contact with the music, and invariably I am asked, “”What’s the best way to get to know classical music?” My initial reply is, “Just listen to it,” which usually gets the response, “well, what exactly should I listen to?”

Well, there are many potential answers to this question. Back when I worked for a record company it was easy to just hand a bunch of CDs to someone – the “Mad About” series that I helped produce for Deutsche Grammophon – and tell them to listen and let me know what they liked, but I was still surprised over time when people would tell me that the problem wasn’t just “what” to listen to but also “when.”When, as in, “I was having people over for dinner, and I put on one of those CDs you gave me and while some of the tracks were perfect, some of them were really distracting.”

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At only 29 years of age, soprano Danielle de Niese regularly graces many of the world’s most prestigious opera and concert stages, and has released her first solo album as part of her exclusive contract with Decca Records, titled Handel Arias.This February she embarks on a seven-city recital tour of North America, which culminates in an appearance Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall on February 27^th. Australian-born to parents of Sri Lankan and Dutch heritage, Danielle de Niese grew up in Los Angeles.Her career got off to a prestigious start when, at age 18, she became the youngest singer ever to enter the Metropolitan Opera Young Artist Program.

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Mark O’Connor is a composer and violinist whose fluency with both classical and American traditions has made him one of the most acclaimed figures in contemporary music. In October 2008, O’Connor began a year as the first Artist in Residence at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA, and in November, gave a two-day residency at Philadelphia’s Curtis School of Music. O’Connor takes educating the next generation of musicians seriously – his annual String Camps provide hundreds of students with intensive training from O’Connor and some of the world’s finest performers and teachers. His Americana Symphony, “Variations on Appalachia Waltz,” was recently recorded by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop conducting, and will be released March 10, 2009 by OMAC Records.

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Described by the New Yorker as “friendly, unpretentious, idealistic, and highly skilled,” the new-music sextet eighth blackbird promises – and delivers – provocative and engaging performances to its ever-growing audiences. Combining bracing virtuosity with a fresh and alluring sense of irreverence and panache, the sextet debunks the myth that contemporary music is only for a cerebral few. With a Grammy Award recently tucked under its belt, the ensemble promises a season of debuts, premieres and high-class collaborations, including jamming with Wilco’s drummer in Chicago; debuts in Australia, England, and Rotterdam; world premieres by Rzewski and Reich in New York’s funky Kitchen, alongside the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble; and taking the reigns as Music Director at the Ojai Music Festival. eighth blackbird is a client of 21C Media Group.

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Jake Heggie’s opera Dead Man Walking, a collaboration with librettist Terrance McNally, is a milestone in contemporary opera. Since its premiere in 2000, the work has become one of the opera world’s most performed new works. In addition to his other operas, the San Francisco-based Heggie is a prolific songwriter whose works have been performed and recorded by some of the most beloved singers of our time, most notably Frederica von Stade, Susan Graham, Audra McDonald, Patti LuPone and Joyce DiDonato. As a pianist he has accompanied several of these same singers in recital. Though best known for his richly nuanced and emotionally resonant vocal works, he has also composed many chamber and orchestral works. He is currently at work with librettist Gene Scheer on a truly epic project: an opera based on Melville’s Moby Dick, commissioned by Dallas Opera for its inaugural season in the Winspear Opera House in April 2010. The great Canadian tenor Ben Heppner will star as the obsessed whale hunter Captain Ahab.

A person of great warmth and eloquence, with a deep concern for important social issues, Heggie begins the new season with a gala on September 26 at Opera Colorado, where he and Frederica von Stade will perform a program that includes a number of his works. Other fall highlights include opening night of the Broad Theater in Santa Monica, where he will join Frederica von Stade and Kristin Clayton for the Los Angeles premiere of At the Statue of Venus, another of his collaborations with McNally (Oct 11); the premiere of his choral work Faith Disquiet by the Choral Arts of Seattle (Town Hall, Oct 17), the Los Angeles premiere by Seattle’s Music of Remembrance of Heggie & Scheer’s For a Look or a Touch at the Broad Theater in Santa Monica (December 4); the East Coast premiere of Heggie & Scheer’s For a Look or a Touch at the Eastman School of Music (Dec 10, 12 14) and the West Coast premiere of Heggie & Scheer’s opera Three Decembers in a co-production by San Francisco Opera and Cal Performances, starring Frederica von Stade, Kristin Clayton and Keith Phares, conducted by Patrick Summers and directed by Leonard Foglia (Dec 11, 12, 14).

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