Award-Winning Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in Concert with Pianist Ursula Oppens Nov. 10
	Back to the main story		URSULA OPPENS Pianist Ursula Oppens has won equal renown as an interpreter of the established repertoire and a champion of contemporary music. Her performances of music both old and new are marked by a powerful grasp of the composer’s musical intentions and an equally powerful command of the keyboard’s resources. For the 2002-03 season, Oppens appears as a soloist with orchestras in West Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, Iowa, and Washington, and plays Bartôk’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in California. She also collaborates with the Pacifica Quartet for performances at Caramoor in New York and in Louisiana, Utah, New Mexico, and Texas. In June 2002 Oppens played a contemporary concerto by Korean composer Unsuk Chin in Berlin to excellent reviews, and in August 2002 she played at the Ruhr festival, in recital as well as with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (Dennis Russell Davies), playing the Lou Harrison Piano Concerto to celebrate the composer’s 85th birthday. Highlights of recent seasons include residencies at the Tanglewood Music Center; Beethoven with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl; the Henry Cowell Piano Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony; the Copland Piano Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Austin Symphony; Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with both the New Hampshire Symphony and the Memphis Symphony; at New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Harrison Concerto with the American Composers Orchestra; chamber music with the new music ensemble Thamyris at Emory University in Atlanta and with the Juilliard String Quartet; and various recitals. She played the world premiere of Allen Shawn’s Piano Concerto with the Albany Symphony, and at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Oppens presided over the Carnegie Hall Millennium Piano Book, in which she and selected students from various American universities played the world premieres of ten short pieces, intended for the intermediate level pianist, commissioned by Carnegie Hall from ten leading international composers. The compositions were simultaneously published in one volume by Boosey and Hawkes, accompanied by a CD of Oppens performing all ten pieces. Following the world premieres, Oppens performed some of the works in recital and conducted a master class at the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo and at the Music Teachers National Association Conference in Minneapolis. Other highlights include the premiere and tour performances of Elliott Carter’s Piano Quintet with the Arditti String Quartet; the piece was commissioned by the Library of Congress and a consortium of presenters in honor of Carter’s 90th birthday, and was also performed at the University of Illinois’s Krannert Center, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Oppens played Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand at Carnegie Hall with the American Composer’s Orchestra under the baton of Dennis Russell Davies; concertized with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Louis Symphony, and the Louisiana Philharmonic, and played in birthday celebrations for Elliott Carter and Joan Tower in New York. Abroad, Oppens performed in recital in Mexico City, as guest soloist with orchestras in Thessaloniki and Berlin, and with the Arditti Quartet in London, Cologne, Amsterdam, and Brussels. As soloist with the leading orchestras of the U.S. and Europe, Oppens has concertized with the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the San Francisco, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Houston, Cincinnati, and Seattle symphonies, as well as the St. Paul and Los Angeles chamber orchestras, to name a few. In the U.S. she has presented recitals coast-to-coast in various venues and at university and college campuses, especially at New York’s Town Hall, the 92nd Street Y, and Metropolitan Museum of Art; Orchestra Hall in Chicago; and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., among others. In 1994, Oppens was presented for the first time on Carnegie Hall’s Keyboard Virtuoso Series and returned to that prestigious venue in 1997. She often collaborates with various chamber groups, having performed with the Juilliard, Vermeer, and Mendelssohn string quartets, among others. Throughout her career, Oppens has played at many of the world’s major festivals, including those in Aspen, Tanglewood, Santa Fe, Ojai, Edinburgh, Bonn, Cabrillo, Stresa, Bath, Bergama, Brescia, Japan, and the Holland Festival. Abroad, she has played at many of the major music centers in Europe, including the South Bank Center and the BEC Broadcasting House in London, the Vienna Radio Orchestra, the Thétre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, and in Stockholm, Brussels, Geneva, and Bonn. She was praised in particular by the Bonner Rundschau for her "sovereign" performance of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Orchester der Beethovenhalle. An enduring commitment to integrating new music into regular concert life has led Oppens to commission and premiere many new compositions. Among these are works by Anthony Braxton, Elliott Carter, Anthony Davis, John Harbison, Julius Hemphill, Tania Leon, György Ligeti, Witold Lutoslawski, Conlon Nancarrow, Tobias Picker, Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Singleton, Joan Tower, Lois Vierk, Christian Wolff, Amnon Wolman, and Charles Wuorinen. Oppens’s dedication to music of differing styles and periods is reflected in her releases on the Music and Arts label: an all-Beethoven disc featuring the Sonata No. 11 in B flat Major, Op. 22; the Fantasy, Op. 77; and the Sonata No. 27 in B flat Major, Op. 106, Hammerklavier, and a 2-CD set of contemporary American piano works, American Piano Music of Our Time including John Adams’s Phrygian Gates and Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies, as well as works expressly written for Oppens by Julius Hemphill and Conlon Nancarrow. A co-founder of Speculum Musicae, a performing group that has pioneered new music since 1971, Oppens has recorded new works extensively. She received two Grammy nominations: for her Vanguard recording of Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated and for American Piano Music of Our Time. The latter was also named in John Rockwell’s Best of the Year survey for The New York Times along with her recording for New World Records of Elliott Carter’s Piano Concerto. Oppens’s releases include a disc of chamber music by Elliott Carter with the Arditti Quartet on the Audivis label and Charles Wuorinen’s Piano Quintet on Koch International Classics. Other recordings include Joan Tower’s Piano Concerto on De Note Records; Rzewski’s Night Crossing with Fishermen, and a disc of Schoenberg’s vocal music with soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, both for Music and Arts; and the Brahms Viola Sonatas with Barbara Westphal on Bridge Records. Oppens can also be heard on recordings from Angel, Arista, BMG, CBS Masterworks, CP2, CR1, New Albion, New World, Nonesuch, and Watt Works. Oppens studied piano with her mother, Edith Oppens, as well as with Leonard Shure and Guido Agosti, and earned her master’s degree at the Juilliard School, where she studied with Felix Galimir and Rosina Lhévinne. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, she studied English literature and economics. A native New Yorker, Oppens made her New York debut under the auspices of Young Concert Artists. She won first prize in the Busoni International Piano Competition in 1969, and was awarded the Diploma d’onore of the Accademia Chigiani in 1970. In 1976 she won an Avery Fisher Career Grant which led to a performance with the New York Philharmonic. Oppens is the John Evans Distinguished Professor of Music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
			Back to the Backstage Pass