Pushing Back The Frontier

By Michael Walsh

PERFORMER: URSULA OPPENS

ALBUM: AMERICAN PIANO MUSIC OF OUR TIME, VOL. 2

LABEL: MUSIC & ARTS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Oppens shows what can be done when new scores are as well played as Beethoven or Mozart.

She has been called the Madonna of contemporary music, but when Ursula Oppens performs, there's nary a bustier in sight. Instead she is a madonna in a more traditional, iconographic sense -- serene, warm and motherly -- who has been nurturing the course of new music for more than two decades. Three generations of American composers turn to her when they have something new to say and need a keyboard to say it. "First and foremost," observes composer Tobias Picker, voicing a common sentiment, "she is an artist."

With the release of her latest CD, American Piano Music of Our Time, Vol. 2, Oppens continues to push back the frontier she helped open 20 years ago as a member of the seminal New York City-based new-music group Speculum Musicae. The collection of six new pieces, each written or arranged especially for her, shows off the pianist's depth and breadth, running the gamut from the abstractions of Conlon Nancarrow's Two Canons for Ursula to the dense contrapuntal thickets of John Harbison's Piano Sonata No. 1 and the free-form fantasies of Anthony Davis' Middle Passage.

To each work, no matter how disparate in content and style, Oppens brings both a formidable technique and an unerring ear for seductive sonority. An accomplished performer of the standard repertoire as well, Oppens understands that the same pianistic virtues called for in Beethoven and Mozart are necessary in new music.

All performers are essentially storytellers. Oppens can lay out even the most unfamiliar narrative with a clarity and cogency -- and sympathy -- that Hemingway might envy. Take, for example, Frederic Rzewski's touching Mayn Yingele (My Little Boy), a work based on a traditional Jewish ballad and inspired by the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1988. Oppens delicately unravels the composer's series of 24 melancholic variations, successively heightening the tension until she brings the work to a shattering virtuosic climax.

Her feeling for imagery is highlighted in Picker's Old and Lost Rivers, originally conceived in 1986 as an orchestral prelude for the Houston Symphony and later rewritten for Oppens as a birthday present. This four-minute evocation of the East Texas bayous is a kind of contemporary counterpart to Charles Ives' The Housatonic at Stockbridge, and Oppens handsomely captures its meandering, contemplative mood.

And yet she can face down the toughest, most forbidding scores as well. The two canons by the 80-year-old Nancarrow -- whose output for the past 40 years has consisted almost exclusively of works for player piano -- demand intense powers of concentration. In Canon A, notes Oppens, "the left hand starts and is eventually joined by the right hand at an interval of a fifth and a speed that is 7/5th the speed of the left hand." No less impressive is her way with the prickly serialist Charles Wuorinen, whose uncharacteristically frisky The Blue Bamboula she commissioned in 1980.

"She is a wonderful musical citizen," says Wuorinen, "devoted to the cause of living music by living composers." If that devotion has meant years of relative obscurity, watching while lesser talents ride off on the Tchaikovksy concerto, it's a trade-off Oppens has happily made. Thankfully, this humble, almost self-effacing madonna is not a Material Girl, and the musical world is richer for it.