Music at the Southfield Church closes its 10th season on Saturday, June 27, 2026 at 7:00 PM with an evening devoted entirely to the solo piano — and to one of the most distinguished pianists to grace the series’ stage. Peter Orth, winner of the Naumburg International Piano Competition and a former collaborator with the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic, performs a program of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Ravel, and Chopin at the historic Southfield Church, 234 Norfolk Road, Southfield Village, New Marlborough, Massachusetts. Admission is free.

The concert is also a homecoming of a kind. After more than three decades performing and teaching across Europe — and recording an extensive catalog of piano quintet literature with the celebrated German Auryn String Quartet — Orth has recently returned to Pennsylvania, where his musical life began. He brings with him a depth of experience and artistic authority that few pianists of any era can claim.

The recital opens with five of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words — short, luminous piano pieces that distill the essence of vocal melody into the instrument’s own voice. Mendelssohn wrote more than forty of them across his lifetime, and in the hands of a pianist of Orth’s sensitivity they are anything but miniatures: each one a complete emotional world in a few minutes of music.

Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, Op. 53, follows — one of the towering works of the piano literature. Written in 1804, at the threshold of Beethoven’s heroic middle period, the Waldstein is a work of breathtaking scope and invention. Its opening movement drives forward with almost orchestral force; its slow introduction builds to a radiant Rondo finale that dissolves into shimmering cascades of sound. It is music that tests both the pianist and the piano.

After intermission, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin offers a striking shift in palette — and a quietly devastating one. Written between 1914 and 1917, each of its six movements is dedicated to a friend of Ravel’s who died in the First World War. The music looks backward in form, drawing on the Baroque suite, while grieving something entirely of its own moment. In its restraint and crystalline precision, it is among the most moving anti-monuments in the repertoire.

The recital closes with two late Chopin works: the Nocturne in E-flat Major and the Ballade No. 4 in F minor — the last and most complex of the four Ballades, widely considered one of the greatest works ever written for the piano. Its long, arching trajectory from lyrical calm to devastating conclusion has few equals in the literature. It is a fitting close to a season — and to a decade.

Peter Orth began his musical life in suburban Philadelphia and pursued his studies at The Juilliard School on full scholarship under the legendary Russian-American pedagogue Adele Marcus. Rudolf Serkin subsequently invited him to the Marlboro Festival and to his newly-formed Institute for Young Performing Musicians in Vermont.

In 1979, Orth won First Prize in the Naumburg International Piano Competition — given that year in memory of the great American pianist William Kapell — launching a career that brought him to Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Zankel Hall, and the stages of major orchestras across the country. He performed under Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, Herbert Blomstedt, and Kiril Kondrashin, among others. Following his Carnegie Hall orchestral debut, Peter G. Davis wrote in New York Magazine that “Orth is a major talent.” He was subsequently awarded the Shura Cherkassky Prize by the 92nd Street Y.

In the late 1980s, Orth encountered French pianist Paul Doguereau — who had known Maurice Ravel personally and had studied with the great Egon Petri, himself a pupil of Busoni, as well as with Emil von Sauer and Ignace Paderewski. Their work together revolutionized his approach to the keyboard. Around the same time, the legendary Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache invited him to his master classes in Mainz, Germany.

In 1991, Orth met the Auryn String Quartet at the Kuhmo Festival in Finland, beginning an artistic partnership that would eventually bring him to Germany, where he was Professor at the Detmold Hochschule fur Musik and recorded much of the piano quintet literature with the quartet. His recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations for the Challenge label received the Classic Central Golden Label Award.

Peter Orth and his husband, British violist Stewart Eaton of the Auryn Quartet, have recently returned to Pennsylvania to make their permanent home.

Concerts are free. A retiring offering is collected as patrons exit, and an ice cream social on the lawn — weather permitting — follows each performance. The Southfield Church is located at 234 Norfolk Road in Southfield Village, New Marlborough, Massachusetts.