Oppens, Ursula (1944—)

views updated

Oppens, Ursula (1944—)

Renowned American pianist and advocate of new music. Born in 1944 in New York City; daughter of Kurt Oppens (a writer) and Edith Oppens (a classical pianist); received undergraduate degree from Radcliffe College and graduate degree from the Juilliard School of Music; studied under Rosina Lhévinne, Leonard Shure and Guido Agosti; lived with Julius Hemphill (a jazz musician and composer, d. 1995).

A champion of modern composers whose work on their behalf has earned her the honorific "Saint Ursula," Ursula Oppens is also an accomplished classical pianist who believes that exposure to contemporary music only heightens appreciation of the classical canon. Composer Charles Wuorinen described her as "a wonderful musical citizen … devoted to the cause of living music by living composers." A founder, with cellist Fred Sherry and percussionist Richard Fitz, of the pioneering new-music group Speculum Musicae in the early 1970s, she has spent over 30 years helping modern composers find a wider audience by commissioning, playing, and recording their works.

Oppens was born in 1944 to Jewish parents who had fled the Nazi occupation of Prague. Edith Oppens , a classical pianist, and Kurt Oppens, a writer who focused on music, were both music teachers in New York and Aspen, Colorado, and she grew up surrounded by music. While she was still quite young, her piano lessons with her mother had given way to lessons with Victor Babin and Leonard Shure, but as a young adult she still had no definite plans to make a career of music. After studying economics and literature at Radcliffe, she entered graduate school at the Juilliard School of Music, where she studied with Rosina Lhévinne . In 1969, Oppens won the Busoni International Piano Competition, launching her professional career. She was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant seven years later.

Over the years, Oppens has performed with orchestras and symphonies in most major American cities, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta, as well as at Tanglewood and at Aspen. Her international appearances include performances in Paris, London, Geneva, Edinburgh, Bonn, Japan, Bergama, Brussels, Vienna, Stockholm and other cities, and she has made numerous recordings. Among the composers whose works she has premiered or commissioned are Elliott Carter (a joint commission for Night Fantasies), Tobias Picker (Old and Lost Rivers), Frederic Rzewski (the premiere of his huge set of variations, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, which she also recorded), Joan Tower , Julius Hemphill, Wuorinen (The Blue Bamboula), Anthony Davis (Middle Passage), Conlon Nancarrow (Two Canons for Ursula), Lois Vierk , and John Harbison (Piano Sonata No. 1). In 1998–99, with the Arditti String Quartet, Oppens premiered Elliott Carter's Piano Quintet, commissioned in honor of his 90th birthday by the Library of Congress.