In 2015 Jonathan Biss asked five stylistically diverse composers to write concertos that respectively responded to each of Beethoven’s five. The first recording resulting from this project pairs Beethoven’s ubiquitous Emperor Concerto alongside Brett Dean’s ‘answer’ concerto subtitled Gneixendorf Music – Eine Winterreise. Dean draws inspiration from when Beethoven visited his brother Johann in Gneixendorf, only to abruptly leave after a few days following a heated argument. The first of the concerto’s three conjoined movements begins with the orchestra’s pungent sustained chords over détaché outbursts. Biss enters playing rapid passages on a muted upright piano placed within the orchestra. As the movement unfolds, Biss assiduously switches over to a more dominant concert grand. Over the music’s course, one hears obvious yet smartly interpolated quotes from Beethoven’s original, such as his first movement’s descending cascades of arpeggios.

Dean’s second movement blends the tenuously tuned upright’s ethereal chords with mellifluous woodwind and brass clusters, building up to a cacophonous climax at approximately 5'42". Following asymmetric Stravinsky-inspired tuttis, the music more or less returns to its point of origin. The brisk, energetic third movement functions as a kind of neo-Prokofiev coda that ends quietly. While Biss’s assured command of the demanding keyboard-writing and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra’s bracing proficiency are well captured in the live on-location engineering, I wonder if a more distantly positioned upright would have made for greater spatial and emotional contrasts in relation to the concert grand.

In the Emperor, Biss and conductor David Afkham face strong recent catalogue competition from more robustly and vividly detailed versions, including Zhang/Stutzmann/Philadelphia (BIS, 1/23), Ohlsson/Runnicles/Grand Teton (Reference, 7/23) and Barnatan/Gilbert/Academy of St Martin in the Fields (Pentatone, 12/20). Afkham shares these podium colleagues’ propensity for certain period-performance characteristics such as discreet string vibrato, arguably gratuitous dynamic swells and dips, woodwinds to the fore and prominent timpani. I find much of Biss’s pearly, intimately scaled phrasing tasteful and on point, more akin to the Kempff aesthetic than Schnabel’s cosmic wildness, although the latter’s tendency to angularise passagework rears its head on occasion: in the first movement’s sequence with right-hand thirds against descending left-hand triplets, for example (7'02").

However, I miss the surging dynamism that pianists as antipodal as Arrau, Fleisher and Uchida bring to the outer movements’ broken octaves, sweeping scales and big rhetorical flourishes. One can take dictation from Biss’s scrupulous and attentive phrasing in the slow movement. But compare Biss’s textbook clarity alongside Emil Gilels’s magically rapturous entrance in the recording with Leopold Ludwig and the Philharmonia Orchestra (Warner, 11/57), and you enter a whole other world. Biss’s booklet notes reveal how equally articulate, perceptive, intelligent and honest he is away from the keyboard.