I would urge anyone who cares about piano-playing or, more specifically, music-making on the piano, but who hasn’t followed the career of Jonathan Biss, to do so. Over the past couple of decades, the accident of proximity has allowed me to follow his remarkable career from two perspectives: hearing Biss in performance every other season or so and listening to the steady accumulation of his recordings. Though Biss is now 44, the breadth and depth of his artistry continue to develop, with the same inquisitiveness and probity that characterised him as a young musician. He began recording Beethoven’s concertos last year in partnership with the Swedish Radio SO. Biss pairs each Beethoven concerto with a contemporary concertante piece that he has commissioned, and each release is directed by a different conductor. The C major Concerto was recorded alongside Sally Beamish’s City Stanzas under Omer Meir Wellber, while the Emperor was paired with Brett Dean’s A Winter’s Journey under David Afkham (8/24).

The most recent is Beethoven’s B flat Concerto, Op 19, balanced with The Blind Banister, a concerto written for Biss by Timo Andres, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. An earlier recording of Banister, with the composer as soloist, was reviewed in these pages (Nonesuch, 5/24). The Beethoven is compelling from beginning to end, with Pekka Kuusisto and the Swedish Radio players full and enthusiastic partners, never failing to keep up their end of the conversation. Meanwhile, Biss has so internalised Beethoven’s characteristic expression that I cannot think of another performance of this piece with every articulation and dynamic so accurately and naturally realised. The Adagio is breathtaking in its sublime serenity. The Rondo is gay and carefree, its impetus only occasionally relaxed to savour a witticism or drollery. This may be the most Mozart-like of the five numbered concertos but it is 100 per cent Beethoven.

Andres’s The Blind Banister is music by a pianist for a pianist and is, in that sense, sheer listening joy. It is a beautifully wrought score of immense subtlety and invention. The gossamer textures of both the solo and orchestral writing are beautifully realised, moving mysteriously, suggestively and with a pliancy and cohesion more suggestive of a chamber idiom than the heroic ostentation of the typical concerto. An inspired juxtaposition!