Jonathan Biss (piano), Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Pekka Kuusisto

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.2 in B-flat Major, Op.19
Andres, T: The Blind Banister

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 nine years. The project yielded five extraordinary new piano works by some of today's most significant composers, responding to Beethoven's own concerti.

Volume Three sees Timo Andres’s third piano concerto, which takes its title from “Schubertiana” by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, and envisions a “blind banister that finds its way in the darkness.” As his banister, Timo Andres seizes on the cadenza Beethoven wrote for the first movement of the Second Concerto. Beethoven pulled out all the harmonic and contrapuntal stops, and Timo Andres chose to carry that exploration a couple of centuries forward.

Jonathan Biss explains: "While there are no direct quotations in it, the piece is based on certain ideas Timo Andres has about the way in which Beethoven’s cadenza corresponds to his piece, and the way in which their different languages come together."

The Blind Banister was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist and was subsequently performed by the New York Philharmonic in April 2017.