Long considered a preeminent concert pianist, Ursula Oppens is adept both as a soloist and a chamber player, with a repertoire that stretches from Mozart to jazz composer Anthony Braxton. For more than 25 years she’s been on the road, averaging at least 50 engagements a season. But now she’s cut back her daunting schedule to become a music professor at Northwestern University.
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Oppens’s new position won’t put an end to her concert career, but touring no longer seems as important as when she was pegged as a promising newcomer and was expected to live up to the billing. She started off with a bang in 1969, when she won first prize in the prestigious Busoni International Piano Competition and then made her Carnegie Hall debut. Yet both honors represented the culmination of a long, thorough preparation for a life in the limelight. The daughter of a piano tuner and a renowned piano teacher, Oppens grew up in an intensely musical and intellectual household in New York City. She studied classical music with her mother, Edith Oppens, and later with Leonard Shure, a teacher with a formidable, almost intimidating reputation. “I was immersed in the Germanic repertoire, day in and day out,” she recalls. “My mother had been a student of Anton Webern, so we were very partial to the Viennese.” But her exposure to other 20th-century composers was limited. “They weren’t taken seriously by my parents’ crowd. I later came to believe that those musician friends were all miserable, restricted by their own taste to play the same stuff over and over again.”
While a student at Harvard, Oppens befriended composer John Harbison and his wife. “They invited me to play with their chamber group and introduced me to the chamber works of Bartok and Sessions, among others,” she says. “For the first time I found an area of music I could call my own and not my mother’s.” Struck by her dazzling command of technique and her willingness to experiment with the new, Harbison started writing pieces for her. Their partnership established a pattern in Oppens’s artistic life: “I tend to work closely with a composer. If I have questions about interpretation, I just call him or her up. I try to be part of the creative process.”
Oppens is currently planning to embark on a survey of Beethoven’s piano music. She recently heard the 32 sonatas interpreted by Richard Goode. “His were convincing,” she says. “Yet I think mine will be quite different–in sonority, in the analytical approach, in insight. They will reflect my personality, my background. And that’s what great art, old and new, ought to do.”
