Some years ago, Jonathan Biss was preparing to spend a couple of weeks as resident pianist with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Instead of planning a regular programme, however, the players asked whether he’d like to collaborate on something a little more adventurous. “I thought, ‘Why not suggest a completely crazy project?’” Biss tells Apple Music Classical. “The worst that can happen is that they’ll say no. So I floated this idea of five commissions which would be paired with each of the five Beethoven piano concertos.” Alongside the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Biss ended up partnering with 14 additional orchestras to bring about Beethoven/5, a set of major new concertos by Sally Beamish, Caroline Shaw, Salvatore Sciarrino, Timo Andres and for this, the first album of the series, Brett Dean. Each new work is designed to be performed alongside its designated Beethoven work. But why Beethoven? “I think there were two motivations,” says Biss. “The first is that I do think there is something about Beethoven’s force of personality—there’s probably no other composer who offers that much grip, no matter what idiom they write in, their language or background. But it’s not even about his greatness. It’s about his hugeness. You could ask any kind of composer to write something based on a piece or germ of Beethoven, and they’d probably have something to say about it.” The other motivating factor, adds Biss, was the chance to continue his passion of working with living composers. Before Beethoven/5, Biss had commissioned major pieces from David Ludwig, Leon Kirchner and Bernard Rands among others. “I’ve always felt that commissioning new work is incredibly important,” says Biss, “and so I thought that this would be another way to make sizeable contributions to the repertoire.” Paired with the Piano Concerto No. 5 on this album, featuring the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor David Afkham, Brett Dean’s Gneixendorf Music—A Winter Journey is based on a little-known chapter in Beethoven’s life, six months before his death. In September 1826, with his nephew Karl in tow, the composer arrived at his brother’s house in the Austrian village of Gneixendorf. An argument between the two siblings led to Beethoven and Karl moving into a house up the road, owned by the businessman Ignaz Wissgrill. The pair stayed there for two months, during which Beethoven composed his Op. 135 String Quartet and made major revisions to his Symphony No. 9. His return journey to Vienna was blighted by freezing weather, and Beethoven never recovered from the pneumonia he contracted as a result, dying the following March. Dean mines this rich seam of material in a piece that is full of humour and virtuosity, and packed with quotes from the “Emperor” Concerto and other works. “It’s a piece about Beethoven’s frailty,” says Biss, “the frailty of this person who was such a life force. So much of the piece is propulsive, witty and borderline aggressive. And then suddenly there are these moments of incredibly beautiful reverie—they’re even more beautiful because of the context, because they come out of this whirlwind of activity.” Biss starts out on an upright piano positioned at the back of the orchestra—before long, Dean then instructs the soloist to use the practice pedal, which creates a muffled sound by bringing a sheet of felt down between hammers and strings. “I’m playing with all of my might and barely any sound comes out of the instrument,” says Biss. “It’s a kind of metaphor for Beethoven at the end of his life—the belligerent, confrontational personality is still there, but the ability to be heard is so compromised by his own hearing, his health and by his general diminishing.” The colossal opening movement is followed by an ethereal, distorted second movement that once again mirrors the extreme stage of Beethoven’s deafness. We finish with a coda-like finale, subtitled with the composer’s apocryphal final words, “Applause, Friends, the Comedy is Over”. The music’s grimacing irony is short-lived as it hurtles to its conclusion. We begin with a typically brilliant, enriching performance by Biss and the Swedish RSO of the “Emperor” Concerto itself. Did Biss’ experience with Brett Dean’s music affect the way he performed it? “When I started working on the ‘Emperor’, he says, “I can’t undo the fact that I grew up hearing Leon Fleisher, Rudolf Serkin and so many other people play it. But, of course, I had no such experience with Brett Dean’s concerto. I had to figure it out from the beginning, and that forced me to listen in a certain way. So, I do believe that I bring back that kind of listening to older music when I go back to it. And that’s one of the reasons that I want to play new music.”