ALL-AMERICAN DIVA | PAGE 1, 2
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When I first interviewed her in 1990, I wrote, "There is a refreshing down-to-earth quality about Dawn Upshaw, almost as though she is reserving all her sophistication for her music." I cringe as I reread that sentence, which seems to imply that offstage she is a doltish clod. Yet it's true: There's not a trace of diva temperament about her. Four years ago, she revealed to a reporter for the New York Times that she still scrubs the bathrooms in the house in Westchester County, N.Y., where she lives with her husband, Michael Nott, and her two young children. "Oh, yeah. I still do. I do lots of scrubbing. I don't think of myself as some sort of queen," she said. "We have a very ordinary household." (Just try to picture Callas rolling up her sleeves and scrubbing the bathtub.)

Yet the choices she has made as a musician reveal a subtle, brilliant -- and, yes, sophisticated -- mind at work. When I met her for that first interview, Upshaw had recently won the Grammy award for the first of her solo recordings with Nonesuch Records, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," with the Orchestra of St. Luke's conducted by David Zinman, with whom she has since collaborated often. There's nothing particularly inspired about the choice of the title work, a haunting, elegiac piece by Samuel Barber, setting a reminiscence of childhood by James Agee. In fact, it's something of a chestnut, and was probably selected in the hope that the popularity of the piece would give legs to the artist's debut recording with the label. But look at how she fills out the disc: the aria "What a Curse for a Woman is a Timid Man," from an obscure one-act radio opera by Gian Carlo Menotti called "The Old Maid and the Thief"; John Harbison's evocative, at moments ecstatic, settings of visionary poems by a 16th century Indian woman named Mirabai; and Anne Trulove's thrilling aria "No Word from Tom," from Igor Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress." It's a perfect little program. The theme is longing, the forms it can take -- nostalgia, sexual desire, spiritual quest -- but it's not overstated. It's an all-American album (let it not be forgotten that Stravinsky composed "The Rake's Progress" in Hollywood while Auden and Kallman were writing the libretto in Greenwich Village). It brings attention to a composer who, by 1989, had begun to be neglected (Menotti) and champions a contemporary composer (Harbison) by putting him on a platform with Barber and Stravinsky. And it is divinely sung.

"Knoxville: Summer of 1915" and all of its successors have been quite different from each other, yet they have all been chosen boldly and performed with exquisite refinement. An Upshaw program is immediately recognizable by its mingling of the familiar and the obscure, the homely and the exotic, yet it always makes musical sense. Most programming of contemporary music attempts to lure the audience in by including some golden oldies, sweetening the Scandinavian atonality with Mozart or Haydn. It's done in the name of eclecticism, but the result is often illogical, and, despite learned program notes searching for a rationale, it creates a puzzling, unreal sound world. Upshaw's programs, on the other hand, are pure and organic, like a musical garden.

The follow-up to "Knoxville" was a set called "The Girl With the Orange Lips," which included Ravel's famous settings of Mallarmé; some songs by Stravinsky based upon Russian and Japanese poetry; a rapturous lyric to Psyché by Manuel de Falla; four hypnotic Hindu songs by Maurice Delage, a minor student of Ravel's; and, anchoring the program, a haunting suite by the contemporary American composer Earl Kim, setting Apollinaire and Rimbaud, from which the album takes its title. The result is a voyage into an ethereal realm of myth and illusion, shimmering with fabulous, gemlike color. In 1991 "The Girl With the Orange Lips," like "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" before it, won the Grammy for best classical vocal performance.

Later that year, Upshaw sang the solo part on the bestselling classical album ever, Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3, subtitled "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," performed by the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Zinman. The disc has sold more than 1 million units worldwide. This is a serious work, a skillful exercise in polyphony (one critic said that if Bach were alive today, he might be writing music like this) that weaves an evocative mood of misery, woe and lamentation. It is one of the most depressing pieces of music ever written, and its popular success remains a complete mystery to me. The texts that Upshaw sings are a 15th-century Polish prayer known as the Holy Cross Lament, a prayer written by an 18-year-old girl on the wall of a Gestapo prison during World War II and a Polish folk song about a mother in wartime trying to find the body of her dead baby son. Hardly the stuff of platinum, one would have thought. Yet when it came out, David Zinman said, "It changes people's lives. They're stunned. They don't know what it is. I'm told people stop their cars when they hear it on the radio." Upshaw's performance is a fine one, ranging in tone from uninflected purity to intense passion, but it remains an anomaly in her career.

Aside from the five minutes of music for the Wood Bird and the Shepherd Boy, the Countess Ceprano's five seconds and an occasional Christmastime performance as Gretel in Engelbert Humperdinck's children's opera, the 19th century remains a void in Upshaw's opera career. She is a woman of two centuries, the 18th and the 20th: Mozart and Handel, Debussy and Stravinsky are her composers. In 1992 she appeared in the role of the angel in Peter Sellars' production of Olivier Messiaen's sole opera, "St. Francis of Assisi," the first since the work's premiere. The staging was controversial, using a blinding array of fluorescent tubes and video monitors to illustrate the life of the simple saint, but everyone, critics and audience alike, agreed that Upshaw was radiant as the angel. (She sang the role again last summer, when the production was revived at the Salzburg Festival.)

Soon Upshaw will be a singer of two millennia: on Dec. 20 of this year (with performances extending into next January), she will create the role of Daisy Buchanan in John Harbison's new opera, "The Great Gatsby." If you're one of those people who think it's interesting to insist that the millennium doesn't begin until 2001, she is also scheduled to take part in the world premiere of Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen's first opera, "The Woman and the Ape," at the Aix-en-Provence Festival of that year. She devotes much of her time to looking for new music -- of course, it is every young composer's dream to be championed by Dawn Upshaw. Yet, she says, she is very picky, choosing no more than 5 to 10 percent of the compositions that are submitted to her: "Most of what I receive does not touch me," she explains, "but I'm still fascinated by what's out there."

If Dawn Upshaw has a flaw as an artist, it's that she is too nice. Wisely, she has chosen the stage roles that suit her sunny good nature -- angel, romantic servant girl, princess lost in a fairyland of bird-catchers and dragons. It will be interesting to see how she copes with the emotionally darker world of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as created for her by Harbison. In her pop collections, she has chosen the breezy over the torchy, the sweet over the bittersweet, which can lend a note of sameness to the discs. (Of course, the same might be said of a collection of Wagner arias by Birgit Nilsson, or of Caruso's discs of Neapolitan songs.)

For her Rodgers and Hart collection, typically, she dug up a few rarities that only the most devoted Broadway fanatics had heard: Come on, did you really know "He Was Too Good to Me," a number cut from "Simple Simon" (1930)? She ranges effortlessly from moods of wistful yearning to sentimental warmth to sheer euphoria. Some critics complained that compared with the jazz singers who took this material and made it their own, Upshaw isn't sexy enough. They may be right about that, but I would respond that she sure knows how to flirt. And if you have too much euphoria in your life, there's always Górecki.
SALON | March 30, 1999

Jamie James writes for the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and other publications.

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