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Grammy Award, 2020 – Producer Of The Year, Classical DAVID FROST "Listening, you’re struck by Biss’s emotional intelligence, his wit, shrewd judgement and open-hearted communicativeness. No sound, no gesture seems greater than what is absolutely necessary to convey Beethoven’s message, naked and unadorned...Rarely are hand, mind and heart united as you’ll hear them here." - Gramophone A key thread in pianist Jonathan Biss’s decade-long, multi-project Beethoven immersion has been his journey to record all 32 of the composer’s piano sonatas, which he began in 2011 and completes with the release of the cycle’s ninth and final volume by Orchid Classics. Comprising Sonata No. 7 in D major, Op. 10/3; Sonata No. 18 in E-flat major, Op. 31/3 (“The Hunt”); and Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, the new album is one of many highlights of Mr. Biss’s season—coinciding with worldwide celebrations of Beethoven’s 250th birthday—devoted not only to the composer, but the sonatas themselves. Regarding the 32 piano sonatas, which have been Mr. Biss’s primary focus among all of Beethoven’s works, he said: “Beethoven’s sonatas have been a constant presence in my life for nearly as long as I have been playing the piano. ‘Presence’ is too mild a word, though: ‘force’ comes a bit closer to conveying the space he occupies in my heart and head. For playing Beethoven does not feel like a matter of choice: his concerns are so all-encompassing, his mastery so astonishing, his personality so combative (yet, somehow, also so sympathetic), one cannot look (listen?) away.” - Jonathan Biss