When Lambert Orkis does something, he does it thoroughly. He’s interested in birds, so he gets expensive cameras and lenses and learns how to photograph them like a professional. He’s interested in early pianos, so he owns five of them. He’s interested in collaborative piano, so he has been working with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter for 25 years — since shortly before her Carnegie Hall debut in 1988. They’ll celebrate that anniversary with a joint appearance in December, and they’re leading up to it with several bouts of touring, one of which will bring them to Strathmore on Tuesday night.
Mutter is one of the world’s leading violinists. Orkis is a little harder to pin down. Few pianists are “just” accompanists, but Orkis’s breadth of interests have added up to an uncommonly rich musical life. Go to a National Symphony Orchestra concert and you may see him sitting in the back of the orchestra as its principal keyboardist; he’s also sat in front of it playing a concerto at Carnegie Hall. You can hear him with the Kennedy Center Chamber Players, which he co-founded in 2003, or playing on historical instruments with the Smithsonian Castle Trio at the National Museum of American History. A number of living composers have written new works for him — George Crumb, Richard Wernick, James Primrosch. Yet one of his main focuses is the very old: playing and recording Beethoven, for example, on the kind of instruments Beethoven would actually have used.
(From Lambert Orkis) - Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Lambert Orkis in concert.
“The only map I had for my performing life,” said Orkis, now 66, from his home in Virginia last week, “was I enjoyed playing the piano.”
Collaborative piano gets a bad rap. Once you are labeled “accompanist,” you risk being overshadowed by a more famous partner. You have to do a lot of the heavy lifting onstage; you often take part in repertory planning (Orkis suggests works to Mutter, and vice versa); but you don’t always get an equal share of the glory. “It is funny,” says the pianist Inon Barnatan, a soloist who also works with the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, “how a cello and piano recital can quickly become a cello recital, in terms of how people view it.”
Orkis knows a thing or two about that. Before Mutter, his regular instrumental partner was the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who as the NSO’s music director also brought Orkis to the orchestra. While the two men became close personal friends over 11 years, their work wasn’t exactly a partnership of equals. “He personally knew the composers of a number of the pieces that we played,” Orkis says, citing Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten. “He’d been playing these pieces for many years. I wasn’t about to say a lot of things to him.” Playing with Rostropovich, he says, was like “riding a tiger.”
With Mutter, however, there has been more give-and-take — not least because Orkis has been working with her since early in her career. In fact, the two first met when Mutter came to Washington at 16 to make her NSO debut under Rostropovich in 1980. She performed Mozart’s third concerto; but to Mutter’s recollection, it was the Glazunov concerto she ran through in private for the maestro, with a rehearsal pianist she didn’t know. “He already stood out,” she recalled last week, speaking by phone from her hotel room in San Francisco a few hours before she was scheduled to take the stage with that erstwhile rehearsal pianist. “This was a musician who works with you, brings his own ideas.” At the time, though, she was playing with the pianist Alexis Weissenberg, and it took several years for her and Orkis — again at Rostropovich’s instigation — to start working together.
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