PRAISE
“He lends a crisply enunciated touch... with [a] head-spinning range of colors”
“imaginative programme-building and intelligent artistry”
“Weiss has both powerful technique and exceptional insight”
“an impressive pianist”
“He is clearly a pianist to watch”
“A pianist whose playing’s characterized by sensitivity, nuance, and insight.”
“an effortlessly brilliant performer”
“bountiful thought behind the technical strength”
“simply breathtaking”
“Weiss achieved a rare, affecting delicacy and inwardness. Sublime.”
“It was a thrill to hear him play so well”
Selected Features
WQXR
Pianist Orion Weiss plays Ravel with a special visualization designed by Tal Rosner, plus a conversation with host John Schaefer.
In Conversation | Orion has been thinking about music and spirituality in recent years, as his brother Abraham moved to Israel and became a rabbi. Both Weiss brothers join John Schaefer to discuss their apparently different but perhaps parallel paths.
MORE REVIEWS
“His carefully scaled dynamics and unlimited colour palette bring mesmerising symphonic continuity to the extensive third-movement variations.”
—Gramophone
"When you're named after one of the biggest constellations in the night sky, the pressure is on to display a little star power — and the young pianist Orion Weiss did exactly that in a high-powered and often ferocious recital Saturday afternoon at the Terrace Theater. Weiss has been racking up an impressive string of triumphs lately (he filled in at the last minute for an ailing Leon Fleischer last summer, turning in a raved-about performance with the Boston Symphony), and Saturday's recital showed why. Just 30, the pianist has an exceptionally clean technique with virtuosity to spare."
—The Washington Post
“There's something quite distinctively poetic in his tone and his phrasing; the evergreen music seemed to reveal lots of fresh growth as he played.”
— Baltimore Sun
“Playing with a rich, even voluptuous tone, and with cascades of notes from the ever reliable Weiss, the concerto made a tremendous impression on the audience”
—Calgary Herald
“Weiss has both powerful technique and exceptional insight, and brought an almost sculptural presence and weight to the music.”
—The Washington Post
“an effortlessly brilliant performer … With technique to burn and strongly personable energy, Weiss, who has already won the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, would seem to have a major career in front of him.”
—The Arizona Republic
"The gods of music must be smiling upon Orion Weiss. Here was playing of inspired virtuosity, but with bountiful thought behind the technical strength."
—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH)
"Weiss' playing is at once sensitive and technically dazzling and he manages to elicit an ethereal quality at just the right moments, for just the right amount of time. The result is a bewitching sense of yearning and – above all – passion."
—Daily Camera (Boulder, CO)
"Every rhythmic device, every coloration, every piquant harmony was in place, driven by a remarkable musical intelligence working through fingers of astonishing strength and agility. It was simply breathtaking, defying further analysis."
—Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, FL)
"Weiss played with a strong sense of line and shape, delivered with a fluid technical command."
—Akron Beacon Journal
"Visibly absorbed, he played music from the inside out, transcending its formidable technical challenges and endowing its rhythmic and harmonic innovations with terrific conviction and expressive vitality. It was a thrill to hear him play so well."
—Santa Barbara News-Press