Peter Orth

Peter Orth was born in suburban Philadelphia, where he began his first piano lessons at the age of six, and then in his early teenage years moved to Reading, Pa. After high school, he was admitted to The Juilliard School on full scholarship, where he was a pupil of the great Russian-American pedagogue Adele Marcus.

After his studies in New York, Rudolf Serkin invited the young Orth to the Marlboro Festival and subsequently 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.

The Naumburg Prize put Orth on the musical map and led to acclaimed New York debuts and engagements with major orchestras, touring coast-to-coast in recital and performing chamber music with “Music from Marlboro”. He performed with Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, Herbert Blomstedt, Karil Kondrashin, James Conlin, and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. He made his Carnegie Hall orchestra debut with Sergiu Commissiona and the American Symphony, after which Peter G. Davis reported in New York Magazine that “Orth is a major talent”. Orth was awarded the Shura Cherkassky Prize by the 92nd Street Y in New York, where he often played, and he also performed concerts in Alice Tully Hall and Zankel Hall.

In the late 1980’s, Orth met the late French pianist Paul Doguereau in Boston -Doguereau awarded Orth the Peabody Mason Prize. He also studied with Doguereau, who knew Maurice Ravel and had studied with the great pianist and Busoni pupil Egon Petri, as well as with Emil von Sauer and Ignace Paderewski. Their lessons together revolutionized Orth’s work at the keyboard. In that same time, Orth encountered the legendary Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache, who invited him to his master classes in Mainz, Germany.

In 1991, Orth became acquainted with the German Auryn String Quartet at the Kuhmo Festival in Finland. This eventually led to Orth’s moving to Germany and ultimately recording most of the piano quintet literature with them. He is married to Stewart Eaton, the British violist of the Auryn Quartet. Arriving to live in Germany in 1992 presented a challenging situation for Orth, as he had no infrastructure or history there professionally. He subsequently performed extensively in Europe with tours of Holland, Italy and Ireland, while maintaining a close artistic relationship with the Auryn Quartet.

Orth was Professor at the Detmold Hochschule für Musik in Detmold from 2010. The first of his three recordings for the Challenge Label, in which Orth performed Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, received the Classic Central Golden Label Award.

He and Stewart Eaton have just recently returned to Pennsylvania to live here permanently.