A new Dawn

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This article was published 22/03/2012 (5102 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Classical music is often described as the domain of dead, white, male Europeans.

World-renowned American soprano Dawn Upshaw started her career inside the boundaries of that traditional realm. For nearly 20 years, from 1984 to 2003, she sparkled on the stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, graduating from light, bubbly soubrette roles to stardom, particularly in Mozart operas.

But after nearly 300 performances at the Met, international appearances and many recordings and honours, Upshaw left old-school opera behind.

Now 51 years old, the four-time Grammy winner with the awe-inspiring voice has spent most of the past decade seeking out collaborations with living composers and new-music artists.

She works frequently with the Kronos Quartet. She has been a muse for composers such as Finland’s Kaija Saariaho (featured at Winnipeg’s New Music Festival this season), who wrote the celebrated opera L’Amour de loin (Love From Afar) for her.

In 2007, Upshaw received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, making her the first singer to be awarded the five-year “genius grant” that has gone to giants such as Susan Sontag and Twyla Tharp. The foundation recognized her as “a new model of a performer, directly involved in the creation of contemporary music.”

Upshaw not only stars in new works by big names such as John Harbison and John Adams, she commissions up-and-coming composers. She has performed the premières of more than 25 works in the last 10 years.

“It’s the music of my time — of my contemporaries,” the soprano says from her home just north of New York City.

“I’m interested in engaging in a vital and inspiring way with colleagues and other musicians. It is, of course, very direct and involved when you’re working in new music. I find that fascinating and revitalizing.”

Last year, when Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra conductor Alexander Mickelthwate announced the current season, he singled out Upshaw as the most exciting guest in the entire lineup. “She has that completely pure, crystal-clean soprano voice … and a very adventurous spirit,” he said.

The soprano makes her Winnipeg debut this Friday and Saturday. She’ll perform songs by Osvaldo Golijov and French folk songs collected and arranged by Joseph Canteloube on a program that’s rounded out by orchestral Debussy and Stravinsky works.

Mickelthwate has worked with Upshaw twice before. One of her frequent collaborators is composer/conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who was music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic when Mickelthwate was conducting there from 2004 to 2007.

Mickelthwate says Upshaw would be a natural fit for the WSO’s New Music Festival, and he hopes to bring her back. “We have to see how we continue this relationship,” he says.

The divorced mother of two grown children grew up in a Chicago suburb. She is often called a “down-to-earth diva.” The Boston Globe said three years ago, “Listeners in her presence experience music not as the inaccessible product of a holy art but as a thing of open, approachable beauty.”

The seven French folk songs on the Winnipeg program, collected by Canteloube (and recorded by Upshaw with conductor Kent Nagano), have that approachable quality.

“I think they’re just gorgeous,” she says. “The orchestrations are so colourful and imaginative, so rich, so gratifying to sing. You feel like you’re really using every bit of your body.”

In 2006, Upshaw was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer and underwent surgery and chemotherapy. Though she had always been lauded for soul-baring interpretations, since her post-treatment comeback she has earned even higher praise for her emotional conviction.

“I’m blown away by the power of music, the way it can comfort and heal and enlighten and touch us,” she says. “I see it as my job as a singer to try to get to the core of that, in any piece….

“I came from a musical upbringing that was more about folk music. I was growing up during the civil rights movement in the ’60s. My parents were music lovers and amateur musicians (the family performed as the Upshaw Family Singers).

“In the house they were playing recordings of Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez. I was so aware of the role that music took on, to try to change the world. The music had such purpose. That made a really strong impact on me.”

Upshaw says she has tried to write her own music, and can’t. “I do not have that talent,” she says. “I wish I could be a singer-songwriter, the way Joni Mitchell has been.”

A recent art encounter that deeply moved her was Pina, the Oscar-nominated 3-D documentary by Wim Wenders. It celebrates the late German choreographer Pina Bausch through performances by her dancers.

“It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theatre,” Upshaw says. “I just found her choreography and the beauty of the dancers to be wrenching. It cuts straight through your heart.”

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca