PIANIST URSULA OPPENS TO CELEBRATE COPLAND

There may not be a more popular living American composer than Aaron Copland (who turns 85 on Thursday). Audiences never seem to tire of his splashy, tuneful orchestral pieces. Which leads Ursula Oppens to ask of his Piano Concerto, “Why isn’t it performed more?”

The New York-based pianist, who will play the work at concerts by Erich Leinsdorf and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Music Center beginning on Copland’s birthday, can barely contain herself in singing its praises. “It’s so jazz-flavored (the two-movement piece received its premiere in 1926. Especially the last movement, which is rich in jazz instrumentation and a walking bass and all that. And the first movement is full of the wide open spaces. I think it’s a masterpiece.”

So why has it been ignored so in the concert hall? Good question, Oppens says. “I know that at first everyone was shocked by it. But those were the conservative symphony audiences. They just weren’t ready for it.” The way Copland uses the piano, she adds, may have seemed off-putting back then. “It’s not supposed to be an expressive, 19th-Century sound--it’s a modern sound, a raucous, barroom sound. There’s a direct aggression in it.”

Oppens has garnered a reputation as a champion of piano music from this century, though, she notes, “I haven’t abandoned the old stuff--I’m just better known for the new stuff.” So far, she has resisted the lure of electronic music, though almost every area of pianistic experimentation has proven an attraction. Even improvisation.

“It took me about two years after I first got interested in it before I could even play a note,” she recalls. “But now I quite enjoy it. Anthony Davis and Earl Howard have written works for me that have extended improvised sections.”

Does this new approach to the piano help in such jazzy pieces as the Copland? It does, Oppens replies, “but even more, it moves me one step closer to composing. It makes me aware of all the elements I have control over. There are, still, so many possibilities of sound with the piano.”

The Philharmonic program, incidentally, will include another Copland opus, “Proclamation,” written for solo piano in 1982 and given its West Coast premiere in Phillip Ramey’s orchestral setting. Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony completes the program.

BAY AREA NEWS: As part of its American Music Week celebration beginning today, the San Francisco Symphony will host Ellen Taafe Zwilich in both performances of her music (the premiere of the Symphony No. 2, subtitled “Cello Symphony” and “Celebration,” heard at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s opening event of the season) as well as in discussions and a symposium with the New York composer.

The San Francisco Symphony has also announced the appointment of Andrew Massey as associate conductor and Leif Bjaland as assistant conductor. Bjaland had served as a conducting fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute Orchestra for the past two summers.

AROUND TOWN: At 83, Claudio Arrau shows no signs of slowing down. Witness the celebrated pianist’s program at Ambassador Auditorium on Thursday: four sonatas by Beethoven--Nos. 4, 30, 26 and 21.

Another veteran pianist, Johana Harris-Heggie, will be heard in recital this week. On Tuesday in Schoenberg Hall, she will share the stage with fellow UCLA faculty member Yukiko Kamei in a program of works for violin and piano by Brahms, Roy Harris and Schubert, plus Henri Lazarof’s solo-violin Lyric Suite.