The Interview: Dawn Upshaw - Music - The Observer

The interview: Dawn Upshaw | Music | The Observer
7/24/13 8:41 AM
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Dawn chorus
She was always gifted, but then a battle with cancer saw the blossoming of a remarkable new creative force. Peter Conrad meets the US soprano hailed as a musical genius
Peter Conrad The Observer, Saturday 15 March 2008
An American journalist, meaning to be complimentary, once described Dawn Upshaw as 'the thinking man's soubrette'. Well, I'm a thinking man, but I can testify, after meeting her last week in New York, that she is no soubrette. Soubrettes are opera's airheads: high, light sopranos cast as simpering peasants or saucy maids. Upshaw, on the contrary, is a free-thinking brainbox; recently, she won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, one of the so-called 'genius grants' previously awarded to Susan Sontag and Thomas Pynchon. The foundation saluted her as 'a new model of a performer, directly involved in the creation of contemporary music'. Who better to open the Barbican's Present Voices season in Osvaldo Golijov's opera about the murder of the poet Lorca, Ainadamar? The woman who met me at the station in a commuter town north of Manhattan, sensibly swathed in a duffel coat, might have been a suburban mother who had completed the school run and the grocery shopping. Upshaw, who married the son of her voice teacher and has two children, doesn't look like an opera singer or think of herself as one. 'Only people who don't know me call me that. Like my accountant, he always writes it on my tax return! Apparently Leonard Bernstein put "musician" down as his occupation. That sounds more like it.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/mar/16/classicalmusicandopera.review
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As we walked to a Japanese restaurant for lunch, she took stock of the shops. 'We've got everything here,' she said, 'except cheap clothes!' That deficiency would not bother a soprano like Anna Netrebko, who gaily flaunts her Escada gowns and Chopard jewels. But Upshaw is anchored to the earth, which is what makes her vocal flights above it - for instance when she sings the annunciating angel in Messiaen's St Franois d'Assise - so wondrous. At lunch, however, she did something uncharacteristically operatic: she called for a 'passion roll'. Though I expected to see a soprano-sustaining pile of bleeding meat, the aphrodisiac item turned out to be a tube of fish and avocado, admittedly stained with plush red sauce. 'Hmm,' she said as she tucked in, 'it's usually fresher than this.' Upshaw the iconoclast began by doing the things that were expected of her. At the Metropolitan Opera, she first sang small, sometimes invisible roles: an offstage shepherd in Wagner, a vocalising echo in Strauss. She graduated to Mozart heroines Susanna the below-stairs minx in The Marriage of Figaro, Zerlina the village flirt in Don Giovanni - but remained, in the casting department's estimation, no more than a cutiepie. In concerts, she had more freedom, alternating between German lieder and Broadway show songs. Even so, she didn't behave conventionally: at the first recital of hers I attended, I remember being startled and delighted when she talked to the audience as well as singing at us. An enforced hiatus in 2006, when she underwent surgery and chemotherapy after a diagnosis of breast cancer, underlined the importance of doing only what mattered to her. The reborn, newly healthy Upshaw has reinvented herself as a performer who is also a co-creator. She works with composers such as Golijov and Kaija Saariaho, whose oratorio about Resistance martyr Simone Weil, La Passion de Simone, she sang at the Barbican last summer, and extends commissions to a new generation of musicians like David Bruce, a young Englishman whose chamber opera will be performed this month by the students Upshaw coaches. The MacArthur citation is accurate; a genius is a generator and Upshaw brings music to birth. Golijov, paying tribute to his ideal interpreter, has said: 'I don't compose for her. Sometimes, I feel that she's composing me!' Her grateful colleagues often call her a muse, though this pedestalled status makes her giggle. 'No, it's not, "Come, let me inspire you,"' she said, with a parody of a dizzy diva's self-importance. 'It's more like, "Hey, I really connect with your music and if you like the way I sing it, then let's do
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business!"' What I have always been moved by in Upshaw's singing is its soulful, lunar quality. Some of her recital programmes have a non-denominationally religious agenda; a series she devised in 1996 was entitled 'Voices of the Spirit' and set out to dramatise the instant of spiritual awakening, the lapse into doubt, and the final arrival at trusting faith. 'My father was a minister in the United Church of Christ when I was growing up. I went to church a lot; that's maybe why I've never been at home with organised religion. But I've always felt that music must have some kind of message or mission. My parents were very involved in the civil rights movement in the Sixties. They did their bit by forming the Upshaw Family Singers. My dad played guitar and we had amateur gigs at church socials, doing the folky things Joan Baez and Pete Seeger sang. It was music that addressed the conscience, that wanted to change things - and it did!' Upshaw remains politically aware and is an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama. 'I'm so excited about him! But have you heard about Eliot Spitzer?' That very day, the governor of New York, a fire-breathing crusader for public morality, had been forced to resign after the FBI exposed him as a frequent customer of an expensive call-girl service. She rolled her eyes incredulously. Politics has its disappointments, all the more reason to seek refuge in music. 'When a performance goes well, I feel I've lost myself and I'm connected to ... to I don't know what. That's how I felt in L'Amour de loin.' This is the opera Saariaho wrote for Upshaw, who plays the muse of an adoring troubadour. 'At the end, I just floated off into Kaija's sound world, as if I became part of something almost galactic. But of course I was also rolling round on the floor in a pool of cold water! People often say that if you're troubled or in pain, music can be a healing force. I know it's true because when I was ill, I listened over and over to Bach to soothe my anxiety.' Among the discs she used as therapy was a performance of Bach cantatas about mortality by her beloved colleague Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who was killed in 2006 by the same cancer that Upshaw has fought off. 'That is the most touching performance of anything ever! It's about fear and anguish, but the way Lorraine sings made it soothing. It was a blessing.' She illustrated her esteem for Hunt Lieberson by putting down her chopsticks, making a bowl of her hands and lifting them into the air. The mute gesture said everything, but I asked her to explain it. 'Let's see,' she frowned. 'I guess I made a
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cup with my hands to show this is something I value, that I want to protect. Then I raise it on high because that's where Lorraine belongs.' Words are at a loss in dealing with such subjects and Upshaw, who can rely on the inarticulate eloquence of music, is right to be verbally wary. When I questioned her about Saariaho - a Finn, very different from the ebulliently Latin Golijov - she hesitated. 'I'd say there was something ecstatic about her - but nowadays, ecstasy is a drug, and I don't mean anything physical. I see Kaija as an ecstatic being and you can hear that in her music.' In the roles Saariaho has written for Upshaw, the ardour is pure; the composer's other favourite soprano, Karita Mattila, who sings Saariaho's new work, Mirage, at the Barbican on Wednesday, can produce an ecstasy that is searingly erotic. Saariaho has a pair of muses, one sacred and the other fierily profane. But Upshaw, too, can descend from the stratosphere and root around in raunchier depths. Golijov's music requires a gutsier sound and in his cycle Ayre she has to keen, ululate and bark like a manic mongrel dog. 'Yes,' she grinned, 'it's lovely to let rip.' One of my favourite recorded performances of hers is a Rodgers and Hart song about a wicked hoyden who gets away with murder because all her sexual crimes are committed 'with a twinkle in her eye'. I asked where the delicious, devilish twinkle in Upshaw's voice on this track came from. 'Oh my!' she gulped. 'Don't we all have life experiences we can draw on? Come now!' A convulsive belly laugh rocked her body as she savoured secret memories. Recovering her composure, she apologised for disconcerting me. 'It's better not to have these ethereal ideas about muses,' she said. 'You know what happens to the poet in L'Amour de loin: he sees her and he drops dead. So maybe he was right to keep his distance!' The shock didn't make me regret meeting Upshaw. Next time, however, I may try the passion roll. Upshaw - a life: 'It's her nature to singI Born 17 July 1960, Nashville, Tennessee. Education BA music, Illinois Wesleyan University, MA, Manhattan School of Music. Career highlights 1984 Joined New York's Metropolitan Opera. Made her debut in Verdi's Rigoletto.
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1985 Won the Naumburg Competition. 1989 and 1991 Grammy winner for best vocal soloist. 1993 Received worldwide acclaim for her recording of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs with David Zinman, which sold more than a million copies. Personal life Married to Michael Nott. Two children. They said: 'It's her nature to sing, just like it's a bird's nature. That's why she's here on earth.' Robert Shaw, conductor. ! Dawn Upshaw sings Golijov's Ainadamar on 13 April; Saariaho's Adriana Mater follows on 24 April. Karita Mattila sings Saariaho's Mirage on 19 March. All at the Barbican, London EC2 Get the Guardian's daily US email
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