Meet the Artist……Ursula Oppens
Who or what inspired you to take up the piano, and make it your career?
My mother was a piano teacher; my father a musicologist and piano tuner. I was far from imagining that I wanted to be a professional pianist, though. When during the one hour of career counseling I received in college it was suggested that I learn to type, I thought that I can already play the piano, and the two skills are somewhat similar.
Who or what were the most important influences on your playing?
Of course, my parents. As a child I spent every summer at the Aspen Music Festival, and heard many concerts. I was especially moved by the Juilliard String Quartet, whom I heard play the complete Beethoven Quartets, the complete Bartok, and the Carter Quartets as they were being written.
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
The daily challenge is to remain positive and with focus.
Which repertoire/composers do you think you play best?
I find it personally necessary to practice a variety of music each day. I have had wonderful experiences with composers whom I know and have had significant works written for me. I have also performed all the Beethoven piano sonatas. At the moment, some highlights of my daily practice are the very different, but both very romantic Franck Piano Quintet and Carter Night Fantasies.
How do you make repertoire choices from season to season?
They are a combination of my own thoughts and the wishes of presenters.
Which performances/recordings are you most proud of?
In recent years, I have been asked to perform Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated to commemorate various historical anniversaries: The 40th anniversary of the Portugese “Carnation” revolution, and the 50th anniversary of the coup that resulted in the Brazilian dictatorship on the 60’s.
Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in?
In New York City these range from Carnegie Hall to the Barge on the East River
Favourite pieces to perform? Listen to?
I am always excited by whatever I perform. I love to go to operas, both those written by my friends and the greatest of all the classics, Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, etc.
Who are your favourite musicians?
It is impossible to name all the truly exciting musicians – there are so many. Right now, I am listening to pianists from Claudio Arrau to Yuja Wang.
What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?
Always remember that performance is communication with another person. What you will say will change all the time, and that is good.
Ursula Oppens makes a rare UK appearance in Brighton on Friday 19th September, performing music by Carter, Ravel, Rzewski, Bolcom and Wuorinen. Further details and tickets
Pianist Ursula Oppens, one of the very first artists to grasp the importance of programming traditional and contemporary works in equal measure, has won a singular place in the hearts of her public, critics, and colleagues alike. Her sterling musicianship, uncanny understanding of the composer’s artistic argument, and lifelong study of the keyboard’s resources, have placed her among the elect of performing musicians.
Ursula Oppens studied piano with her mother, the late Edith Oppens, as well as with Leonard Shure and Guido Agosti. She received her master’s degree at The Juilliard School, where she studied with Felix Galimir and Rosina Lhévinne. After 14 years as the John Evans Distinguished Professor of Music at Northwestern University, Ms. Oppens is now a Distinguished Professor on the faculty of the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. (source: Colbert Artists)
Music Notes – How to Cast a Spell with Schumann’s #30 From Album for the Young
Guest post from Nancy M Williams
Schumann’s #30 (* * * (untitled), in F major) from Album for the Young has a way of casting a spell of contemplation over its listeners. Whenever I perform this music, I meditate on how I reclaimed my passion for classical piano music. As your guest columnist, I want to share with you my secrets on how to study and play the #30 with best effect.
In April, I performed the #30 as part of “Claiming Your Passion”, a keynote workshop I gave at a Toronto conference. I hesitated before including this relatively unknown piece in my program. How would it fare in a lineup with recognizable works by Chopin and Schubert? I placed the #30 towards the end of my workshop, when participants would reflect on a plan for claiming their passions.
At the workshop, as soon as I rippled the #30’s opening chord arpeggiato, the music’s calming harmonies drew me in. I contemplated the 25 long years, from the summer of my 16th birthday until my early 40s, when the piano had lain fallow in my life. I thought about the bliss that I had experienced once I reclaimed the piano, bliss that had radiated outwards, turbocharging my career as a speaker and writer and strengthening my family life. Now at the workshop, I played the #30’s ending, two Ds ringing out, connected by a chromatic inner voice, followed by a simple, plainspoken resolution to F major. Afterwards, I felt gratified when several participants told me that their favorite piece of music was the #30.
The #30 is one of the pieces at the back of Album for the Young that offers concert repertoire that is nonetheless accessible for the advanced student of adult piano lessons. In order to appreciate this music, we should start with its composer. Robert Schumann loved writing almost as much as composing. In the mid-1830s, he launched, as chief editor, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music). For his journal, he often wrote under the pen names of two distinct personalities, Florestan and Eusebius. While Florestan was impulsive and exuberant, Eusebius was thoughtful and contemplative.
These two aspects of Schumann’s personality also suffused his music. The #30 “is contemplative and expresses the Eusebius side of Schumann’s personality,” says Mark Pakman, adjunct professor at the Cali School of Music and my piano teacher. Once I learned the notes, I agreed with his assessment. This four-minute piece doesn’t have a dramatic arc with crashing chords or chattering scales; the sound ascends to forte on only two brief occasions.
The biggest challenge in studying the #30 is to create its contemplative mood via meaningful phrasing. The phrases in this decidedly Romantic music have less resolution than music from the preceding Classical era. Take, for example, the #30’s opening motif, a C lingering with longing, two As gaining urgency, and then the motif sliding with resignation into a G. This G clearly marks the end of the motif, yet it feels somewhat unresolved, as though the impulsive Florestan had snuck into the music and sliced off the motif. I found that playing only the top melodic notes of the chords helped me to absorb the melody and its phrasing. Away from the piano, I tested myself, making sure I could sing the melody in tune and out loud.
Further complicating the phrasing is the fact that the #30 has a surprising amount of repetition. The opening motif I described above appears four times in the music’s first period, a section that is then repeated, at Schumann’s suggestion, in pianissimo. Moreover, the entire second half of the music is essentially a repeat of the first. When my piano teacher first showed me the music, I silently registered the repetition with some glee: I could learn the notes quickly. Yet once I absorbed the notes I faced the challenge of preventing the music from sliding into a pool of monotony.
One technique for creating variety in the #30 is to use tempo rubato. Take, for example the opening motif, the lingering C, followed by two As, and finished with G. My piano teacher and I decided that the first time I played this motif, I would slightly delay the dotted C note, in contrast to playing the motif strictly in time in its next appearance.
I also used shades of different mood states within my own mind to create a slightly different color with the repeat of the opening section. This music reminds me of my own 25-year-long wandering back to the piano. The first time I played the opening section, I thought about the longing I had for piano music during that time in my life when I was not playing. The second time through, I reflected on how, now that I have reclaimed my passion for the piano, I actively seek to dedicate myself to music.
I’ll share with you a few more tips that I assimilated learning this music:
- Schumann begins the music with a chord arpeggiato, and uses them frequently throughout the #30. Don’t do as I did, and create a bad habit that is later difficult to undo, by playing all three notes of these chord arpeggiatos with equal emphasis. The top note is the melodic one. If you play the first two notes with a delicate touch and allow the top note of each arpeggiated chord to ring out, the music will shimmer.
- In the #30’s second section (measures 9 to 16, repeated in 25 to 32), half-note, trombone-like octaves ring out, while an inner voice picks its way up and down the keyboard, as though stepping through wildflowers. In order to achieve a contrasting effect, practice the octaves and the inner voice separately.
- If you’re like me, and you sometimes forget to pedal, especially when you are concentrating on tricky chord changes, then pay special attention to measures 22 and 23 (repeated in 38 and 39). Here a crowd of tied notes, 16th notes, and inner voices create a general confusion, but stay calm and make sure you pedal after each eighth note.
Schumann’s #30 from Album for the Young has become a staple of my repertoire. I hope you will obtain as much enjoyment as I did studying this music. For me, the contemplative #30 packages feelings of longing and seeking with a wrapping paper softly glowing when turned towards the light.
Watch Nancy play Schumann’s #30 from Album for the Young
http://www.grandpianopassion.com/2014/01/05/schumann-album-for-the-young-30/
Nancy M. Williams is a motivational speaker on “Claiming Your Passion” and an award-winning creative nonfiction writer. She is also the Founding Editor of the online magazine Grand Piano Passion™. An amateur concert pianist, she debuted in 2012 at Carnegie Hall in a master class recital.
“Claiming Your Passion”
Are today’s concert pianists boring?
An article by Martin Kettle, which originally appeared in The Guardian in 2002 and has been doing the rounds of the social networks recently, claims that today’s concert pianists as “so boring”. He waxes nostalgic about the great pianists of yesteryear (Cortot, Horowitz, Rubenstein, Schnabel, Kempf, Serkin, Richter et al), highlighting wondrous sound, insightful and profound interpretations (“Arrau’s Beethoven always had a sacramental feel. Serkin’s Beethoven and Schubert recitals, of which I heard several, were overwhelmingly creative experiences in ways that one now never hears”), a seeming “golden age” of pianism that has passed, never to be rekindled; but the author singularly fails to explain exactly why he feels today’s pianists are boring.
Every age has its “greats” who are remembered, sometimes through rose-tinted spectacles, for their uniqueness, their special qualities. I believe that there are many pianists alive and working today who will also be remembered as “greats” in years to come, and I feel that the international piano scene today is very much alive, rich, varied and exciting. It is also highly competitive, never more so than now in our image-driven, here-today-gone-tomorrow fast-paced 21st-century world.
The life of the concert pianist is hard and can be a smothering profession. All the hours spent working, conjuring magic out of that big box of wood and wires, with only dead composers for companions, can feel like a form of captivity, the grinding, solitary hours of practise only intermittently relieved by work with colleagues, ensembles and orchestras and conductors, and of course concerts. It can be a tough, restrictive and lonely life. Then there is the traveling, living out of a suitcase, sometimes a different place each night, playing an unfamiliar instrument in a foreign concert hall of uncertain acoustic, fine foreign cities viewed through the fog of travel fatigue. These days, audience expectations seem higher than ever and so the pressure to achieve is matched only by the pressure to sustain, and the uncomfortable knowledge that one’s reputation is only as good as one’s last performance.
To sustain a successful solo career it strikes me that one needs a thick skin, a keen focus and a hefty dose of self-belief and self-reliance. If my Meet the Artist interviews have revealed one key insight (amongst many other fascinating revelations), it is that a musician, whatever their discipline, must remain true to themselves and their own artistic vision. Yet, it can be hard not to endlessly compare oneself with others, with one’s peers, and wonder whether one should be doing it differently.
Alongside this, I feel that the wealth of high-quality recordings available today places an additional burden on performers to produce faultless performances every time. Competitions are also to blame in this regard, with performers under pressure to produce a
perfect rendition in artificial surroundings.
Today digital and social media mean that concert artists can offer innovative ways of traveling well-trodden paths, which can shine a new light on their work and provide audiences with different insights into the working and creative life of the musician. Valentina Lisitsa is perhaps the most famous example of this. Her YouTube films of her practise sessions and her concerts receive millions of hits. But this pianist is no nine-day wonder: I heard her at the Wigmore Hall earlier this year and was impressed to discover she is a “real pianist”, not just a YouTube sensation. Sure, the internet has contributed to her success, but fundamentally she is a committed and very genuine concert artist.
Many pianists working today are stepping outside the traditional concert hall to present music in more informal and/or intimate settings; others are engaged in unusual collaborations, pushing the boundaries of the instrument, commissioning new works, and inspiring the next generation of young musicians.
I will include my personal “top 5” pianists of today at the end of this post. In the meantime, I’d like to publish some of the comments I received on Facebook in response to Martin Kettle’s article:
“…..to say that [today’s pianists] are boring is just ignorant of the fact that there are musicians who can give phenomenal performances which will be in the memory of the keen listener for some time. Though there are dozens more, amongst my favourite living pianists are: Claudius Tanski, Grigory Sokolov, Arcadi Volodos, Maurizio Pollini, Carlo Grante, Daniil Trifonov, the list goes on…..” (LJ)
“Murray Perahia for his consistent excellence…. Andras Schiff for his peerless Bach, Stephen Hough for his thoughtful and sensitive playing, Gabriela Montero for her impossible improvisation skills, and Benjamin Grosvenor for his precocity….” (MH)
“In my lifetime I’ve heard Richter, Cherkassky, Perahia, Baremboim, Lugansky, Schiff, Argerich, Ax, Pletnev et al – all original, all interesting. I lament what competitions, conservatoires and editing suites have done and that a style epitomised by Cortot, Friedmann, Paderewski has been left behind, but boring? Not really” (DG)
“Pianists in “olden” days didn’t have and couldn’t conceive of the post-modernisms and post-colonialsms we have now. Meaning our “now” is about curating and curatorship rather than the “authenticity” of first-hand connection between pianist and composer. There’s also the interesting point about “boredom” in the title of the article – John Cage has pointed out boredom describes what we feel when we don’t connect to the moment, the now. Cage’s point was non-connection is fine (and also it’s temporary). It belongs to the individual rather than whatever the individual is looking at or hearing or experiencing…” (MP)
“There are many tremendously gifted pianists today, performing, recording and in intimate new venues scattered throughout the world…….there are exceptional musicians out there. The recital will thrive, and I surmise there will always be a turnover of talent as generations overlap. I actually see the piano as very much alive. There is a new generation of players studying now, and they will soon be noticed.” (JB)
“This idea of a ‘great’ artist is simply personal taste” (JdC)
“Technology, YouTube, new artists, have expanded classical pianist visibility on an extraordinary level. Simply stated, there is something for everyone now.” (JB)
My top 5 living concert pianists:
Murray Perahia – consistently excellent in all repertoire. I particularly like his ability to highlight the interior architecture and secondary voices in Bach and Chopin.
Grigory Sokolov – insightful Bach and Chopin coupled with an exquisite sound
Marc-Andre Hamelin – pianist and composer, Hamelin is, to my mind, a modern-day Liszt. A real musical polymath who combines extraordinary technical prowess with glorious sound and profound musical understanding.
Maria-Joao Pires – sensitive, thoughtful playing, interesting and exciting collaborations, beautiful sound, particularly in Schubert and Mozart
Yevgeny Sudbin – his exquisite touch and gorgeous soundworld blew me away when I heard him at the Wigmore earlier this year. Insightful and penetrating performances.
Please feel free to leave comments and contribute to the discussion
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 