Brentano Quartet
Joseph Conyers, double bass
Jonathan Biss, piano

Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim.  “Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding,” raves the London Independent; the New York Times extols its “luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism.”

Within a few years of its formation, the Quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award and was also honored in the U.K. with the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Outstanding Debut. Since then, the Quartet has concertized widely, performing in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House.

In addition to performing the entire two-century range of the standard quartet repertoire, the Brentano Quartet maintains a strong interest in contemporary music, and has commissioned many new works. Their latest project, a monodrama for quartet and voice called Dido Reimagined, was composed by Pulitzer-winning composer Melinda Wagner and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, and had its premiere in spring 2022 with soprano Dawn Upshaw.  Other recent commissions include the composers Matthew Aucoin,  Lei Liang, Vijay Iyer, James Macmillan, and a cello quintet by Steven Mackey (performed with Wilhelmina Smith, cello.)

The Brentano Quartet has worked closely with other important composers of our time, among them Elliot Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wen-chung, Bruce Adolphe, and György Kurtág.  They have also been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and pianists Richard Goode, Jonathan Biss, and Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet has recorded works by Mozart and Schubert for Azica Records, and all of Beethoven’s late Quartets for the Aeon label. In 2012, they provided the central music (Beethoven Opus 131) for the critically-acclaimed independent film A Late Quartet.

Since 2014, the Brentano Quartet has served as Artists-in-Residence at the Yale School of Music. They were formerly the Ensemble-in-Residence at Princeton University, and were twice invited to be the collaborative ensemble for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

The Quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved”, the intended recipient of his famous love confession.

Joseph H. Conyers was appointed principal bassist with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2023. He had served as acting associate principal bass with the orchestra since 2017 and had served as assistant principal bassist since 2010, following tenures with the Atlanta Symphony, Santa Fe Opera, and Grand Rapids Symphony, where he was principal bass.

Described by the Grand Rapids Press as “a lyrical musician who plays with authenticity that transcends mere technique,” Mr. Conyers has performed with many orchestras as soloist, including the Alabama Symphony, the Flagstaff Symphony, the Richmond Symphony, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, and the Sphinx Symphony, having won second prize at the 2004 Sphinx Competition in Detroit. In 2008 John B Hedges wrote a concerto for him, Prayers of Rain and Wind, commissioned by the Grand Rapids Symphony.

As a chamber musician, Mr. Conyers is an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Other chamber music festivals and collaborations have included the Ilumina Festival (Brazil), the Savannah Music Festival (GA), the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival (VA), the Kingston Chamber Music Festival (RI), the Lexington Chamber Music Festival (KY), and the Festival Internacional de Música de Esmeraldas (Ecuador) with such artists as James Ehnes, Daniel Hope, and members of the Emerson String Quartet.

Mr. Conyers received his bachelor’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with both Harold Robinson, principal bass of The Philadelphia Orchestra, and double bass soloist Edgar Meyer. Other mentors have included David Warshauer, principal bass of the former Savannah Symphony; Daniel Swaim; and Albert Laszlo.

Committed to education and community engagement through music, Mr. Conyers served as adjunct faculty at Calvin College (MI) and Clark Atlanta University; he is currently on the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2019 Sphinx Organization Medal of Excellence, an honor accompanied by a substantial career grant and ceremonies at the Kennedy Center and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Pianist Jonathan Biss is a world-renowned educator and critically-acclaimed author who channels his deep musical curiosity into expansive performances and projects in the concert hall and beyond. Praised as “a superb pianist and also an eloquent and insightful music writer” (The Boston Globe) with “impeccable taste and a formidable technique” (The New Yorker), Biss has appeared internationally as a soloist with the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies, and the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras as well as the London Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw, the Philharmonia, and Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, among many other ensembles. Biss is a teacher, musical thinker, and a performer whose repertoire ranges from the core canon to contemporary commissions. He is Co-Artistic Director alongside Mitsuko Uchida at the Marlboro Music Festival, where he has spent fifteen summers.

In the 2023-24 season, Biss, who has been heralded as “one of today’s foremost Beethoven exponents” (Chicago Tribune), returns to perform his music with the Saint Louis Symphony and Stéphane Dénève, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Ramón Tebar, and the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Seguin at Carnegie Hall, in a concert celebrating the late Rafael Viñoly. Throughout the season, Biss will present a new project that pairs solo piano works by Schubert with new compositions by Alvin Singleton, Tyson Gholston Davis, and Tyshawn Sorey at San Francisco Performances, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, the Scottsdale Center For The Performing Arts, among many others. Biss continues his long-standing collaboration with Mitsuko Uchida with concerts featuring Schubert’s music for piano 4-hands at Carnegie Hall, Princeton University Concerts, and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. He will also appear with the Brentano Quartet at Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake City, Chamber Music Detroit, Club Musical de Québec, the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

European engagements for the 2023-24 season include a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with London Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of conductor Karina Canellakis and a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 1. With the BBC National Orchestra and conductor Ryan Bancroft. Biss also reunites with the Elias String Quartet for performances at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Cockermouth Music Society, and Wigmore Hall. In the new year, Biss will perform works by György Kurtág and Schubert at the Sala Verdi in Milan. He concludes his European season with the Orchestre de chambre de Paris and conductor Pekka Kuusisto with a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Timo Andres’s The Blind Banister, part of his ongoing Beethoven/5 commissioning project, in association with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, which paired each Beethoven concerto with a new concerto composed in response. The project has commissioned a number of today’s leading composers, including Brett Dean, Caroline Shaw, Timo Andres, Sally Beamish, and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Il Sogno di Stradella paired with the fourth. Prior to the Beethoven/5 project, Biss commissioned works by David Ludwig, Leon Kirchner, Lewis Spratlan, and Bernard Rands.

Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020, Biss recorded the composer’s complete piano sonatas, and offered insights to all 32 landmark works via his free, online Coursera lecture series Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. In March 2020, Biss gave a virtual recital presented by 92NY, wherein he performed Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas for an online audience of more than 280,000 people. That year, Biss released his fourth book, UNQUIET: My Life with Beethoven (2020), the first Audible Original by a classical musician and one of Audible’s top audiobooks of 2020.

Biss is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Leonard Bernstein Award, the Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, and a Gilmore Young Artist Award. His albums for EMI won the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and Edison awards. He was an artist-in-residence on American Public Media’s Performance Today and was the first American chosen to participate in the BBC’s New Generation Artist program. He is also on the piano faculty of the New England Conservatory.

Biss is a third-generation professional musician; his grandmother is Raya Garbousova, one of the first famous female cellists (for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto), and his parents are violinist Miriam Fried and violist/violinist Paul Biss. Growing up surrounded by music, Biss began his piano studies at age six, with his first musical collaborations alongside his mother and father. He studied with Evelyne Brancart at Indiana University and Leon Fleisher at the Curtis Institute of Music.