MUSIC REVIEWS : Oppens Undaunted in El Camino Recital

There was a time when Marsee Auditorium--the largest concert hall, with 2,054 seats, at the South Bay Center for the Arts--operated as a distinguished purveyor of the pianistic arts. In this room, we have heard the likes of Rubinstein, Larrocha, Slobodyanik, Achucarro and Freire, as well as many others worthy of note.

Those days are gone, but not over. After a long hiatus, a major pianist in a connoisseur’s program appeared in the El Camino College venue, Saturday night. Ursula Oppens, one of the more accomplished performers and imaginative program-makers in her generation--she turned 50 two months ago--pleased a sizable but boorish audience with a difficult agenda comprising music by Beethoven, Harbison and Ravel.

This listening contingent seemed disconnected to the musical proceedings, yet, except for its puny applause, behaved well, proved attentive and stayed to the very end, when Oppens gave an encore in Tobias Picker’s touching “Old and Lost Rivers” (1986).

The performance proper made sense, though on paper it looked daunting. Oppens approached Beethoven’s final Sonata, Opus 111, with workmanlike directness, creating this monument note-by-note from the composer’s blueprint. She did not sweat or suffer; neither did she commune with angels. She simply gave the work the respect of its score and the honesty of its details. The result--surprise!--sounded like the real thing.

At another extreme of pianistic styles, Oppens lavished on Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” and on his “La Valse,” many possible colors in many different hues. Here, she accomplished without self-consciousness the sweep the composer must have envisioned, as well as an abundance of subtleties other pianists--seeking glory rather than illumination--simply ignore.

There was disappointment, not in the performance but in the work, in Oppens’ well-considered performance of John Harbison’s Sonata No. 1, “Roger Sessions in Memoriam” (1985). The piece, a very old-fashioned, four-movement sonata in endless shades of gray, may very well evoke Sessions’ 1940s heyday; what it does not deliver is Harbison’s own vivacity, pungency and inventiveness.