Word: upshaw
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...storybook debut. In 1988 the Metropolitan Opera needed a last-minute replacement for Kathleen Battle in L'Elisir d'Amore. It turned to an apprentice in its young-artists program named Dawn Upshaw. The audience cheered, and the critics raved about Upshaw's charm and freshness; she seemed set for a predictable rise in the soubrette roles of grand opera. But Upshaw had ideas of her own. A few years earlier, one of her voice teachers, Jan DeGaetani, had told her to "seek your own path." Upshaw took that advice. From Mozart to Stravinsky to show tunes, she sings...
From the moment of the Met triumph, Upshaw made it clear she intended to be a singer first, a diva second. She had performed in only a few operas and had barely established a recital career when she produced two astonishing albums. On one, released in 1989, she sang Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and compositions by Menotti, Stravinsky and John Harbison. The other, which came out two years later, is called The Girl with Orange Lips and is a collection of highly unusual contemporary pieces. Both won Grammys. Her next album, the Symphony No. 3 by Polish...
...opera singers have ever seemed so convincing -- and comfortable -- in the Broadway idiom. Upshaw begins with four songs of yearning for love: the album's title number, taken from Blitzstein's 1959 Juno; There Won't Be Trumpets, a song dropped from Sondheim's short-lived 1964 show Anyone Can Whistle; What More Do I Need?, from an unproduced Sondheim musical of 1954, ! Saturday Night; and That's Him, from Weill and Ogden Nash's 1943 One Touch of Venus. Accompanied alternately by small ensembles and an orchestra, Upshaw stakes her claim as theater music's most luminous ingenue since...
...remainder of the album, Upshaw reveals that she is equally at home in less sentimental moods, skillfully handling, for example, the cynical extravagance of Bernstein's Glitter and Be Gay (from Candide). Only in I Feel Pretty, from West Side Story, does she seem outside the song, pushing its innocence too hard. Otherwise, she conveys what the best singers have always strived for: the sense that a song springs directly from mysterious promptings within...
...recording is the brainchild of Elektra Nonesuch senior vice president Robert Hurwitz, 43. Hurwitz first heard the symphony nearly a decade ago in one of the three previously recorded versions, but upon encountering it again at a London Sinfonietta program in 1989, he determined to record it with Upshaw and Zinman. Gorecki was present for the sessions in London in May 1991. "There is a brutal truth and honesty to this performance," says Hurwitz, "because the performers surrendered themselves to the music...