At 80, the Modest Queen of Contemporary Music Keeps Exploring

On a cold afternoon in early January, the pianist Ursula Oppens was making an album at Brooklyn College.

At 79, Oppens is a little fragile, tiny and stooped. But when she sat down at the piano — shoes off, Diet Coke on the floor — out came playing of power and technical aplomb.

Most of the time, at least. Oppens was setting down the first recording of an early, unpublished sonata by the uncompromising modernist Charles Wuorinen, and, like much of Wuorinen’s music, it was treacherously thorny. She had been studying it, on and off, for a year, but it was still slow going.

“I played a couple of correct notes,” she said after an early take, “but not many.”

That kind of modesty has been mixed in with mastery throughout Oppens’s long, distinguished career. With crystalline lucidity, warm sensitivity and utter authority, she has guided generations of listeners through the seductive complexities of Wuorinen and Elliott Carter, Anthony Davis and Conlon Nancarrow, Frederic Rzewski and Joan Tower, and on and on. She is “the queen of contemporary music,” said Tania León, one of the many composers who have written for her over the last 60 years.

Born on Feb. 2, 1944, Oppens will officially celebrate her 80th birthday at Merkin Concert Hall in Manhattan on Saturday. But — again, that modesty — this isn’t exactly an Ursula Oppens recital. She will be joined by seven pianist colleagues in a concert focused less on her than on the music she has helped bring into the world: eight pieces from her dizzying catalog.