New York Classical Review

Every concert is a little bit of history: the history being played, which is the music, and the history being made, which is the performance itself. Once in a while there are concerts that have an added and marvelous dimension, like the history of how great music came to be.

Pianist Ursula Oppens playing at the Zürcher Gallery Thursday night, the final event of the four-concert Fortissimo 2026 piano festival, was that kind of concert. Oppens is not just one of the great contemporary pianists but a musician who has been essential to the creation of some of the finest and most important works in the modern piano repertoire. What she played Thursday night was two pinnacles of her contributions to classical music, Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies and Fred Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!.

Oppens was one of four pianists—the others were Paul Jacobs, Gilbert Kalish, and Charles Rosen—who commissioned Night Fantasies from Carter, and she played the world premiere in 1980. Since then, it’s been played by numerous other pianists and now holds a prominent place in the literature. 

Oppens also commissioned Rzewski’s masterpiece—one of the greatest theme-and-variations works in the entire canon of classical piano music—played the world premiere in 1976, and made the first recording of it, which won a Grammy.

That’s a resume for a lifetime, much less a single concert. This was a small, relaxed affair, many in the audience clearly there to honor Oppens’ musical career. Likewise, she seemed there to enjoy the satisfaction of her own legacy and share it with the audience.

Now in her 80s, Oppens has lost some certainty in her technique, but still takes complex music like this and plays through it with a clear musical line and expressive purpose. That was one of the pleasures of Night Fantasies, a fascinating abstraction of the line of romantic piano music that runs from Schumann through Ravel. Take Schumann’s approach to fantasy form and style, shade it with Ravel’s vision of night, and you get Carter’s constant flow of dream-like, elusive logic.

Oppens shaped this beautifully, carving a path through the dense shapes and lines at the center of the music, the dream that’s bookended by an gentle, slender opening statement, then trails off quickly at the end at waking. Her touch and phrasing were more legato than on her own superb studio recordings of Carter’s piano music, with graceful arpeggiated runs up and down the keyboard. There was so much thought inside the calm energy of her playing that the music shed some of Carter’s granitic modernism and sounded and felt like a natural extension of 19th century romanticism. It seemed one of those cases where a performer’s long, deep experience with a piece of music delivered a special performance no one else could do.

Deep experience is what Oppens has, almost fifty years with each of these works. It’s always an occasion when she plays Rzewski—even now without the quick, precise articulation that makes her pioneering recording still so exciting. Her legato approach again backlit the rich romanticism in Rzewski’s writing, the fantasy-like flights through variations like the Third, the sonic glow of the sustained staccato chords in Variation 5.

Her playing seemed to get hung up in a few slower transitions, but all the most demanding, toccata-like variations, like the Twenty-Third and the Twenty-Ninth, were strong. The extended coda that begins with Variation 31 was thrilling when she was both repeating and taking apart the central theme and in all the fastest passages, but there were a few moments when the music thins out where she seemed lost.

But through the fifty-five minute performance, her energy was full, and her improvisation inside Variation 35 was brilliant and imaginative. Starting with what was almost a children’s tune variation of the theme, she smoothly transitioned into some knotty music that added a concise but multi-dimensional personal vision onto the music. It sounded like nothing else one has heard, and also exactly right for what was a historic night.