Pianist Ursula Oppens
A Conversation with Bruce Duffie
After earning her master's degree from the Juilliard School of Music, Ursula Oppens won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in 1968. This win led to her New York City debut at Carnegie Hall in 1969. That same year she took first prize at the Busoni International Piano Competition. In 1971 Oppens co-founded the contemporary music ensemble Speculum Musicae. She was one of the first pianists to test the boundaries of traditional concert programming by regularly performing both classics and contemporary pieces on the same programs. One of the foremost champions of new music, several modern composers have written pieces for her, and praise her invaluable encouragement and advice in composition and illumination of their music.
In 2008, Oppens became the Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. From 1994 through the end of the 2007/2008 academic year she served as John Evans Distinguished Professor of Music at Northwestern University.
This conversation was held in April of 1990. She was in Chicago for another varied program which, as usual, included works written for her . . . . .
Bruce Duffie: Usually I ask how you select your repertoire from the wide range of repertoire, but you, particularly, have an expanding repertoire! So how do you decide which pieces you will learn and which pieces you will set aside?
Ursula Oppens: Basically you learn what you’re dying to play! I remember the genesis of this particular program; I commissioned the Nancarrow pieces. That was a very exciting commission to me because I had admired — loved — his player piano music for many, many years. He had only written one three-minute tango for living pianist in ’84, but it was the first thing he had done since 1940, so I felt it was a long courtship. I got a grant and he agreed to write the pieces. He said it might take him a very, very long time to write them, and in fact they arrived, as it were, by return mail, which meant then I was behind! But I was in the fortunate position of being able to plan a whole program around them because it was so far in advance. I received them in ’88 and first played them a year later.
BD: About how much playing time is involved in these works?
UO: Twelve minutes.
BD: Because he is so involved with the player piano, did he specify exactly how long it should take to play?
UO: No, he didn’t specify, but he gave me a tempo, and in fact before I could play it I figured out the tempo and how many measures there were, and more or less decided how long it would be. He has written many, many studies for player piano; they’re very brilliant and quite contrapuntal, and somewhat jazzy.
BD: I did an interview with him, and presented a seventy-fifth birthday program for him on WNIB. It’s fascinating stuff, it really is!
UO: Yeah, it’s fantastic, and this music is fantastic, too. So I had this new piece that reminded me of fireworks and spectacular things, so I thought about what I could do around it. Well, you’ve got to do more etudes, more spectacular kinds of pieces like it, and for many years as a listener I had known the Stravinsky etudes that are also to some extent polyrhythmic. They’re not as grandly polyrhythmic as Nancarrow, but they’re also polyrhythmic, so they just came to mind. They’re also very romantic and Russian sounding, so then Rachmaninoff came to mind!
BD: So this is how you build your programs, little by little?
UO: This one came about little by little. Actually, the Rachmaninoff etudes I hadn’t known, so I was just reading them and I was amazed, because to me they’re very different from most of the Rachmaninoff I know. They’re small pieces and they’re kind of character pieces; they’re very Russian, some of them. Anyway, so that’s how that part of the program got filled. Then I thought, well, I have lots of little pieces so I should have a great big long piece on it, and that’s the part of the program that has changed. I had been playing a Schubert sonata, which was very long, and now I’m doing the Brahms Handel Variations. I’m not sure whether that’s many more little pieces, or one great big piece! That’s what I’m trying to decide at the moment, because it has elements of both, of course.
BD: If this particular concert really works well and holds together, will you then repeat it at other opportunities?
UO: I would like to, because I really love the pieces! I open with a Stravinsky sonata, which is a very different aspect of Stravinsky, but it was after I made up this program that Nancarrow said Stravinsky’s one of his favorite composers! So then I was happy!
BD: Another thread to hold it together?
UO: It’s another thread, but counterpoint is the thread, really. In that sense, counterpoint is very much in the Brahms, too, and I think that really is the thread.
BD: Is this the first time that the Nancarrow work will be played?
UO: No. I played it first almost a year ago, and I’ve played it about seven or eight times.
BD: Is he pleased? I assume he’s heard a tape of the performance.
UO: He actually came to the premiere because it coincided with New Music America which was in New York, and he seemed very pleased. I’ve worked hard on the pieces, and they are fantastic! I think the way he writes music, if you play what he writes, it sounds good. It isn’t as if there’s a mystery. The difficulty is to try to play the rhythms correctly.
BD: Is he making you a living instrument, or is he regarding you as an extended player piano?
UO: I think it’s very much a living instrument! I’ve actually thought that there’s something very interesting, because his machine music does not sound mechanical to me at all. And the piano music, where you try to be very strict, has some aspect of almost the comedy of trying to be mechanical, but is also extremely human. Also, with all the complicated rhythm, it swings I think. So I feel like a happy human being playing it!
BD: You’ve played it seven or eight times. Does it change at all from performance to performance?
UO: The more I feel I can do to make it swing, the happier I am, which is how it changes in me, how I change. And things change in the pianos. I’m not sure that my conception of the piece is radically different; it’s more that my being able to do what I want to do varies.
BD: But here we have a unique individual who writes for the piano, and yet usually he writes for a piano which will always sound exactly the same because of the roll.
UO: I don’t think that’s why he writes for the roll. I always thought he wrote for the roll because it could do all these contrapuntal things and had more fingers. There weren’t pianists around in 1945 in Mexico City who said, “I love polyrhythms and want to practice them.” I don’t think the exact repetition of it is actually an integral element of it; I don’t think that’s the essential element of it in the first place. There is an extent to which things like dynamic contrast and a certain kind of seductive pedal type thing is not really part of the repertoire, you know.