Lambert Orkis

Lambert Orkis ranks among America’s most esteemed pianists, especially for his contributions to chamber music, accompaniment, and advocacy of contemporary works for the instrument. He trained under Eleanor Sokoloff at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Upon completing his studies there, he earned a master’s degree at Temple University’s Esther Boyer College of Music, also in Philadelphia, studying with Maryan Filar. He became affiliated with the Philadelphia Chamber Soloists, the Penn Contemporary Players at the University of Pennsylvania, and Washington’s Twentieth-Century Consort. An additional early connection linked him to the Temple University Music Festival and Institute; from that period in the early 1970s he has sustained a recital partnership with cellist Barbara Haffner, another Philadelphia Chamber Soloists colleague. Since 1968 he has served on the piano faculty of Temple University’s Boyer College, where he emphasizes modern repertory and chamber-music performance in his teaching.

Early on, Orkis accompanied the celebrated American soprano Eleanor Steber during her triumphant return to the concert stage, which launched a second phase of her career. Because Steber focused on American art song and opera, Orkis developed a strong commitment to new American music and subsequently commissioned numerous pieces from leading composers, among them Richard Wernick’s Piano Concerto, George Crumb’s A Little Suite for Christmas, and works by James Primosch and Maurice Wright.

In the late 1970s he served as pianist for a master class given by members of Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, then under the direction of Mstislav Rostropovich. Impressed by Orkis’s playing, Rostropovich engaged him as recital partner and established for him the post of principal keyboard player of the orchestra, a role in which Orkis performs on piano, celesta, harpsichord, and synthesizer. He observed a clear distinction between contributing to the orchestra’s overall sonority and appearing as concerto soloist, and he continued in the position after Leonard Slatkin succeeded Rostropovich as music director.

As Rostropovich’s duo partner, Orkis performed throughout the United States and Asia, appearing before Presidents Reagan, George Bush, and Clinton, King Hussein of Jordan, Emperor Akihito of Japan, and President Gandhi of India. In 1988 he also began a performing partnership with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. In 1998 the pair presented eighty-five recitals devoted exclusively to the ten Beethoven violin sonatas and captured the cycle live in Wiesbaden, Germany; the resulting Deutsche Grammophon recording received the NPR Performance Today Critics’ Choice Award.

Orkis belongs as well to the Castle Trio, a prominent Smithsonian Institution ensemble in Washington that employs period instruments from the museum’s collection suited to the repertoire; the group has made recordings on fortepianos.