Pianist Ursula Oppens has spent the bulk of her professional life championing new keyboard repertoire through performance and recording, prompting numerous leading composers of the era to create pieces expressly for her. Five Grammy Award nominations have come her way.
Born in New York on February 2, 1944, Oppens received her earliest instruction from her mother, Edith Oppens, a prominent piano pedagogue, before continuing with Leonard Shure. She completed her undergraduate studies at Radcliffe College in Massachusetts in 1965, then pursued a master’s degree at New York’s Juilliard School, where Rosa Lhévinne and Felix Galimir served as her principal teachers and she received her diploma in 1967. Her New York recital debut took place in 1969, the same year she captured first prize at the Busoni International Piano Competition. Drawn to modern works early on, she established the ensemble Speculum Musicae in 1971 and stayed with the group through 1982. Her first recording appeared in 1978 on the Piano Classics label and featured Frederic Rzewski’s large-scale The People United Will Never Be Defeated! A broad array of prominent composers have written for her, among them Americans Charles Wuorinen, Elliott Carter, and Conlon Nancarrow as well as György Ligeti and Witold Lutosławski. She joined the piano faculty at Northwestern University from 1994 to 2008 and also offered instruction for several summers at the Tanglewood Music Festival’s institute.
Her extensive discography has centered chiefly, though not solely, on contemporary scores. The initial Rzewski release earned a Grammy nomination, and four further nods followed for Carter: Night Fantasies / Adams: Phrygian Gates (1990), Oppens Plays Carter (2009), Winging It -- Piano Music of John Corigliano (2011), and a later account of The People United Will Never Be Defeated! issued in 2015. Cedille, ECM, Arte Nova, and additional labels have issued her recordings. Still active in advanced age, she brought out Fantasy: Oppens Plays Kaminsky on Cedille in 2021 and appeared in 2024 as accompanist to violinist Rolf Schulte on the Centaur collection American Violin Music: 1947 to 2000. Roughly thirty discs stand to her credit.
