LANCASTER—The Northern Neck Orchestra will launch its 2026-27 season October 10, debuting a new Steinway concert grand piano, with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, conducted by music director Michael Repper and performed by pianist Nina Schumann.
The program also will include Dmitiri Shostakovich’s Festive Overture and Ruth Gipps’s Symphony No. 2.
The performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Lancaster High School Auditorium & Performing Arts Center, 100 Visionary Way, Irvington. A pre-concert talk will begin at 6:45 p.m.
Admission is by season subscription, $160, or $40 for the concert. Tickets may be purchased at the door or www.northernneckorchestra.org.
“It is indeed thrilling to begin an exciting new season in a beautiful new auditorium with a very special new piano, a Steinway Model D concert grand piano,” said Repper. “I am especially pleased that my friend Nina Schumann will be the first musician to perform a concerto on this magnificent piano which is the longtime favorite of the world’s greatest pianists”
Repper said the piano has a new technology called Spirio. It is a high-resolution player piano system that offers access to a library of music virtually indistinguishable from live performance and provides artists with the capabilities to record, edit, playback, search and save.
Schumann is one of South Africa’s most distinguished pianists, delivering more than 150 concerto performances in Europe, the U.S. and South Africa. Schumann is the professor and head of piano at the Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
