Word: upshaw
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Upshaw returned for slightly more modern music: Berg's Seven Early Songs, begun in the composer's twenty-first year. The music is motley, elusive stuff that manages to sound at times like Schumann and at others like Schoenberg. The poetry of the seven different poets is altogether better and fresher than the Schubert texts. Of special literary value is Rilke's text for the fourth song, "The Crown of Dreams," but the musical hair-raisers were the first ("Night") and seventh ("Summer Days"). In each, Upshaw's intonation and delivery etched certain phrases in the mind: "Gib acht" ("give...
...surprise, the program opened with Goode accompanying Upshaw in Schubert songs. Either out of neglect or, more amusingly, as a nod to the super exposure of such music in this eternal Schubertiade of a year, the program notes made no mention of the five featured lieder. All from the last six years of Schubert's life, the songs in this set must have been chosen out of a desire for heavy and contant emotional contrast...
Compared to the outbursts of "Du liebst mich nicht" (You love me not), the opening song, "Im Fruehling" (In Spring), seemed only a bright little ditty. Still, the performance was commanding, mostly because Goode's reserved dynamics suited Upshaw's light voice well, "Du Liebst" was was a fine show for a voice equally suited to the roles of Susanna and Cherubino. Upshaw is far bolder than most vocalists in dramatizing the meaning of the words with gestures and expressions, and she diverted many pairs of eyes from reading the program to staring at the stage. "Die Junge Nonne...
...next song, a slight ballad by Friedrich Rueckert (the same one who made Mahler's masterpiece possible), was the evening's first jewel. As an astute listener remarked, "Dass sie hier gewesen" (That she was here) was ravishing because Goode wove in Upshaw's calm melody among a gently insistent stream of suspended fourths. The last of the five, "Der Musensohn" (The Muses' Son, a poem by Goethe), was a vehicle more for Goode's talent than Upshaw's--his capricious part intimated one of his upcoming Brahms solos. Unfortunately, the lace of technical difficulty left him free...
After justifiably extensive applause, Upshaw left the stage to Goode, who performed the four short pieces of Brahms' Op. 119, three intermezzi and a rhapsody. The first of the set, the intermezzo in B minor, is the thing of devastating beauty. Though Goode's tempi were excessively free, his princely touch and his formidable intellectual grasp of the music overwhelmed all objections. His performance of the bravura E-flat minor rhapsody was the best of the four, demonstrating superior voicing and clealiness of fingerwork...