LEWISBURG — According to a press release, Bucknell University’s Weis Center for the Performing Arts will welcome the acclaimed classical ensemble Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, featuring pianist Garrick Ohlsson, at 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 26.

“Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is a radical experiment in musical democracy, proving for 50 years what happens when exceptional artists gather with total trust in each other and faith in the creative process,” the press release said.

Orpheus began in 1972, when cellist Julian Fifer assembled a group of New York freelancers to play the orchestral repertoire as if it were chamber music. In that age, the idealistic Orpheans snubbed the “corporate” path of symphony orchestras and learned how to play, plan and promote concerts as a collective with leadership roles rotating.

“It’s one thing for four players in a string quartet to lean into the group sound and react spontaneously, but with 20 to 30 musicians together, the complexities and payoffs are magnified exponentially,” said the release.

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s catalog of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, Nonesuch and other labels has grown to include more than 70 albums that stand as benchmarks of the chamber orchestra repertoire, including Haydn symphonies, Mozart concertos and 20th-century gems by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ravel and Bartók.

Orpheus’ performance at the Weis Center will feature American pianist Garrick Ohlsson, and include Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major (Jeunehomme). While Mozart melded styles from near and far to redefine the concerto genre, Brahms mined Handel to craft what he later called his “favorite work,” the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, Op. 24, another piece to be performed. Composer and six-time Grammy-winner Billy Childs infuses classical traditions with his jazz roots in a new work and world premiere for Orpheus called “Each Moment is a New Discovery.”

About Garrick Ohlsson

“Since his triumph as winner of the Chopin International Piano Competition in 1970, Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess,” said the press release. “Although long regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire, which ranges over the entire piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire.”

To date, Ohlsson has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century. The most recent of these is “Oceans Apart” by Justin Dello Joio, commissioned for him by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and now available on Bridge Recordings. He also just released the complete Beethoven concerti with Sir Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra on Reference Recordings.

A native of White Plains, N.Y., Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of 8, at the Westchester Conservatory of Music; at 13 he entered The Juilliard School, in New York City. His musical development has been influenced in completely different ways by a succession of distinguished teachers, most notably Claudio Arrau, Olga Barabini, Tom Lishman, Sascha Gorodnitzki, Rosina Lhévinne and Irma Wolpe.

Although he won First Prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and the 1968 Montréal Piano Competition, it was his 1970 triumph at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where he won the Gold Medal (and remains the single American to have done so), that brought him worldwide recognition as one of the finest pianists of his generation. Since then, he has made nearly a dozen tours of Poland, where he retains immense personal popularity. Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994, and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, MI. He is the 2014 recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music, and in August 2018 the Polish Deputy Culture Minister awarded him with the Gloria Artis Gold Medal for cultural merit.

For more information or tickets, call 570-577-1000 or visit Bucknell.edu/BoxOffice.