Jonathan Biss releases Beethoven/5 Vol. 4, featuring Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 4 and Sciarrino's Il Sogno di Stradella, out now on Orchid Classics

Pianist Jonathan Biss releases Beethoven/5 Vol. 4, featuring Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 and Salvatore Sciarrino's Il Sogno di Stradella, out now on Orchid Classics 

The recording features the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conductor Omer Meir Wellber, and orchestral leader Malin Broman

 

October 3, 2025 – Renowned pianist and Beethoven specialist Jonathan Biss announces the release of the fourth volume in his acclaimed Beethoven/5 project, out October 3 on Orchid Classics. The recording includes Salvatore Sciarrino's Il Sogno di Stradella, paired with Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, and features Biss with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conductor Omer Meir Wellber, and orchestral leader Malin Broman.

The title of Sciarrino’s concerto, Il sogno di Stradella or “the dream of Stradella,” refers to the all-but-forgotten Italian Baroque composer Alessandro Stradella (1639-1682), who was influential in his time. Sciarrino, who has long been associated with the avant-garde, was fascinated with Stradella by the time he composed Il sogno di Stradella. Said Biss: "It’s like Sciarrino is looking backward and Stradella is looking forward, and the meeting of these two very different musical languages makes for a striking and unusual effect. I can’t honestly name another piece I’ve ever heard that I would say it resembles."

Il sogno di Stradella was co-commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra and The Ensemble Intercontemporain. The world premiere was given by Jonathan Biss, with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra with Matthias Pintscher in September 2017.

The recording also includes Biss's performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. Biss has long been recognized for his insightful approach to Beethoven, having performed and recorded the complete sonatas over the course of his career. His scholarship, including the bestselling book Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven and his Coursera lecture series on the composer, has cemented his role as a leading authority on Beethoven’s piano works. With this new release, he continues to bring fresh perspectives to these seminal pieces, capturing their complexity, innovation, and humanity.

In 2015, pianist Jonathan Biss initiated the Beethoven/5 commissioning project with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and more than fifteen other orchestras, resulting in a groundbreaking collaboration over ten years. The project yielded five extraordinary new piano works by some of today’s most significant composers, responding to Beethoven’s own concerti.

 

ABOUT JONATHAN BISS

Pianist Jonathan Biss is recognized globally for his “impeccable taste and a formidable technique” (The New Yorker). Praised by The Boston Globe as “an eloquent and insightful music writer,” Biss published his fourth book, Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven, in 2020. The book was the first Audible Original by a classical musician and one of Audible’s top audiobooks of the year.

Biss has appeared as a soloist with some of the world’s foremost orchestras, including the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Boston Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw, the London Symphony and more.  He has served as the Co-Artistic Director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival alongside pianist Mitsuko Uchida since 2018. He served 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. Biss is also the author of Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven, in which he examines music and his own life’s journey through the lens of Beethoven’s last piano sonatas.

Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020, Biss recorded the composer’s complete piano sonatas, and offered insights to all 32-landmark works via his free, online Coursera lecture series Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. In March 2020, Biss gave a virtual recital presented by 92NY, wherein he performed Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas for an online audience of more than 280,000 people. In 2024, Biss participated in Princeton University Concert’s Healing Through Music Series, appearing alongside author Adam Haslett for a panel discussion on anxiety, depression, and creativity. Biss is the recipient of 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. He was an 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.

Biss is a third-generation professional musician; his grandmother is Raya Garbousova, one of the first famous female cellists (for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto), and his parents are violinist Miriam Fried and violist/violinist Paul Biss. Growing up surrounded by music, Biss began his piano studies at age six, with his first musical collaborations alongside his mother and father. He studied with Evelyne Brancart at Indiana University and Leon Fleisher at the Curtis Institute of Music.

 

ABOUT THE SWEDISH RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

More than 100 exceptional musicians make up the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, a multiple-award-winning ensemble renowned for its high artistic standard and stylistic breadth. The first radio orchestra was founded in 1925, coinciding with Sweden’s first national radio broadcasts.

Daniel Harding has been Music Director of the SRSO since 2007, with 2019 seeing him appointed as the orchestra’s first ever Artistic Director. His extensive tenure will last throughout the 2024/25 season. “It is increasingly rare for the relationship between a conductor and an orchestra not only to last for more than a decade, but to keep growing,” Harding says about working with the orchestra, “it is also rare for an orchestra of the highest musical standard to also very obviously want to keep on growing.”

The orchestra tours regularly, receiving invitations from all over Europe and the world. Recent highlights include two programmes at the Musikverein in Vienna, with programmes including Robert Schumann’s Manfred performed with the Wiener Singverein and actor Cornelius Obonya, and Schumann’s Violin Concerto with Christian Tetzlaff. Additionally, Harding and the SRSO performed an all-Sibelius programme at the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, Finland, featuring María Dueñas in Sibelius’ Violin Concerto.

Upcoming projects include playing major works by Mahler, Strauss, Alfvén and Mozart together with Christian Gerhaher and Maria João Pires, both regular musical partners of Harding and the orchestra. Venues include the Elbphilharmonie, Concertgebouw, KKL Luzern, Philharmonie de Paris and Müpa Budapest.

The SRSO remains a cornerstone of Swedish public service broadcasting, its concerts heard weekly on the classical radio P2 and regularly on Swedish national public television SVT. During the pandemic, its much appreciated on-demand streamed concerts on Berwaldhallen Play brought further worldwide attention to the orchestra.

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra has an extensive and acclaimed recording catalogue. Recent releases include Jesper Nordin’s triptych Röster for orchestra, works by Britten featuring Andrew Staples and the orchestra’s own solo hornist Chris Parkes, and Eduard Tubin’s Double Bass Concerto with the orchestra’s solo bassist Rick Stotijn. Music Director Daniel Harding’s other recent, noteworthy recordings with the SRSO include Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Violin Concerto with Isabelle Faust, Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem featuring Christiane Karg and Matthias Goerne, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.

Two of the SRSO’s former chief conductors, Herbert Blomstedt and Esa-Pekka Salonen, have since been named Conductors Laureate and make regular appearances with the orchestra.

 

ABOUT MALIN BROMAN

Malin Broman is much in demand as an artistic director, soloist and chamber musician. Born in Sweden, Malin completed her studies in London with David Takeno. A passionate chamber musician she has toured and recorded extensively for the last twenty years as a member of the Kungsbacka Piano Trio, Stockholm Syndrome Ensemble and Nash Ensemble of London. In 2008 Malin was appointed concertmaster of the Swedish Radio Orchestra. Since then, she has performed Brahms’ double concerto with Steven Isserlis conducted by Daniel Harding, received rave reviews for her recording of Nielsen’s Violin Concerto and premiered violin concerti written for her by Helen Grime, Sally Beamish, Daniel Börtz, Britta Byström, Andrea Tarrodi, Daniel Nelson and Jesper Nordin.

Aside from regularly directing the Swedish Radio Orchestra she now devotes more time to her work as a musical director/soloist. In that role she has appeared with Tapiola Sinfonietta, Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, ACO Collective (Australia), Scottish Ensemble and Tampere Symphony Orchestra among others and co-operated with artists such as Pekka Kuusisto, Janine Jansen and Peter Mattei. Upcoming engagements include performances with Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Amsterdam Sinfonietta and Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. Malin is currently the Artistic Director of the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra in Finland having succeeded Sakari Oramo and Nordic Chamber Orchestra. During ‘lock-down’ her YouTube video of Mendelssohn‘s Octet, where Malin plays all eight parts, went viral. In 2019 she was awarded H.M. The King’s Medal for her services to music. She plays a 1709 Stradivarius violin generously loaned by the Järnåker Foundation, a Candi viola and a Del Gesù Guarneri copy by Stephan von Baehr.

 

ABOUT OMER MEIR WELLBER

Born in Be’er Sheva, Conductor Omer Meir Wellber began his musical education at the age of five with accordion and piano. From 2000 to 2008 he studied conducting and composition with Eugene Zirlin and Mendi Rodan at the Jerusalem Music Academy before heading to the Berliner Staatsoper and Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, where he assisted Daniel Barenboim from 2008 to 2010.

From then he served as Music Director at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Volksoper Vienna and the 2023 Toscanini Festival in Parma as well as Principal Guest Conductor at the Semperoper Dresden and Chief Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic. From September 2025 he becomes General Music Director of the Hamburg State Opera and the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra.

Omer has conducted some of the world’s most prestigious ensembles, including the Orchestre National de France, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, among others.

Besides his musical creativity, Omer’s everyday life is influenced by a wide variety of interests – he speaks five languages (including German, Italian, English and Russian), and is an advocate of seeing music as a vehicle for social change. Omer Meir Wellber’s debut novel, “Die vier Ohnmachten des Chaim Birkner,” originally written in Hebrew and later translated into several languages, tells the story of a weary man compelled by his daughter to confront life one last time.

 

ABOUT SALVATORE SCIARRINO

Salvatore Sciarrino (Palermo, 1947) boasts of being born free and not in a music school. He started composing when he was twelve as a self-taught musician and held his first public concert in 1962. But Sciarrino considers all the works before 1966 as a developing apprenticeship because that is when his personal style began to reveal itself. There is something particular that characterises his music: it leads to a different way of listening, a global emotional realization, of reality as well as of oneself. And after forty years, the extensive catalogue of Sciarrino’s compositions is still in a phase of surprising creative development. After his classical studies and a few years of university in his home city, the Sicilian composer moved to Rome in 1969 and in 1977 to Milan. Since 1983, he has lived in Città di Castello, in Umbria.

Sciarrino has composed for Teatro alla Scala, RAI, Biennale di Venezia, Stuttgart Opera, Brussels La Monnaie, London Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Suntory Hall, and major festivals such as Salzburg, Donaueschingen, Wien Modern, and Ultima (Oslo), to name a few. Published by Ricordi until 2004 and by Rai Trade since 2005, his discography exceeds 100 acclaimed CDs.

Apart from being author of most of his theatre opera’s librettos, Sciarrino wrote a rich production of articles, essays and texts of various genres some of which have been chosen and collected in Carte da suono, CIDIM – Novecento, 2001. Particularly important is his interdisciplinary book about musical form: Le figure della musica, da Beethoven a oggi, Ricordi 1998.

Sciarrino taught at the Music Academies of Milan (1974-83), Perugia (1983-87) and Florence (1987-96). He also worked as a teacher in various specialization courses and masterclasses among which are those held in Città di Castello from 1979 to 2000 and the Lectures at Boston University. He currently teaches in the summer masterclasses at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. From 1978 to 1980, he was Artistic Director of Teatro Comunale di Bologna.

Sciarrino has won many awards, among the most recent are: the Prince Pierre de Monaco (2003), the prestigious Feltrinelli International Award (Premio Internazionale Feltrinelli) (2003), the Salzburg Music Prize (2006), an International Composition Price established by the Salzburg Land, the Frontiers of Knowledge Prize from the Spanish BBVA Foundation (2011), the A Life in Music Prize from the Teatro La Fenice – Associazione Rubinstein in Venice (2014), the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale (2016).

 

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