May
2012
Statement from Dawn Upshaw's management
January 4, 2012
“Dawn Upshaw is withdrawing from upcoming January 2012 performances in order to complete recovery after successful surgery to remove a small malignancy (unrelated to her 2006 breast cancer). Her physicians have confirmed that the prognosis for a full recovery is excellent, and she expects to resume her performance schedule next month.”
Romana Jaroff
Sr. Vice President, Director of Sales
IMG Artists
New York
REFUNDS AND EXCHANGES
Ticket holders may contact the Armstrong Auditorium box office at (405) 285-1010 to request their choice of a full refund or exchange for another same-priced event in the 2011-2012 season.
Critical Acclaim for Dawn Upshaw
“Upshaw is inspiring. She has always been, but there is a new dimension in her singing. Urgency has mixed into her virtuosity. She has become a master storyteller, fixing the center of every song to set it dancing. She has become a bard.” Hartford Courant“Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for Dawn Upshaw—though the great American soprano has just knocked me clean off my feet. I haven’t been so astounded by a wave of sound in a cathedral since the funeral of Princess Diana….[Ms. Upshaw] groaned and growled, wailed and railed and chanted in duets with recordings of herself, roared like a forest fire before returning to the faintest candle flicker which still illuminated every corner of the building…This beautifully crafted programme was all about belonging and exile. But Dawn Upshaw belongs to the whole world.” Eastern Daily Press (UK)
“Dawn Upshaw is, indisputably, a great singer, with a voice that radiates power and unforced warmth. But her secret weapon is a casual, unpretentious demeanor that lessens the distance between stage and audience. Listeners in her presence experience music not as the inaccessible product of a holy art but as a thing of open, approachable beauty. It's also what allows Upshaw to inhabit the character of her songs so effectively, as she did in both the Ives and a set of French songs. In Ives's ‘Memories’ she turned on a dime from comic glee to wistfulness, and 'Tom Sails Away' evoked the sad memory of a soldier leaving home for war. Debussy's ‘La chevelure’ (‘The Hair’) teemed with a palpably erotic sense of longing, and in Messiaen's ‘Prière exaucée’ (‘Answered Prayer’) the music exploded with primal fervor.” Boston Globe
“Dawn Upshaw is one of the most significant and dramatically moving singers before the public today, and right now she is unmistakably in her prime. Her voice has a pure-toned radiance and earthen warmth, a certain empathic timbre, and often a palpable undertow of yearning. Of course, the classical music world has many singers with magical voices, but Upshaw's rare gift as a performer is an ability to inhabit a work on the most profound levels, to live the music on stage rather than sing it at you. At the end of a strong Upshaw performance, one feels not dazzled by a glittering operatic star, but rather swept into the world of a fellow life-traveler.” Boston Globe
“Dawn Upshaw is a master of the magical moment. While other musicians of her world class caliber will deliver strong performances…the brilliant soprano Upshaw has a gift for taking concertgoers to profound places, sometimes within the space of a few notes….To call this a performance of awe-inspiring depth feels like understatement.” St. Paul Pioneer Press
“Dawn Upshaw’s singing is remarkable for its elastic smoothness, and the control with which she finds surprising and unsuspected colours in each corner of a wide range. Most important is her ability to create in each expressive moment a distinctive feeling and to immerse her voice, artistry, and whole being in it.” Sydney Morning Herald
“Upshaw’s angelic voice is pure, crystal clear, rapturous and every bit as enchanting as heard on her 50-plus recordings.” The Australian
“Dawn Upshaw, who is at her best in music that dwells on extreme passion, gave the intense melancholia and regret of Margarita a wrenching directness. She was in good voice in music that takes her near the extremes of her range.” New York Times
“Soprano Dawn Upshaw, singing in recent years with a new vibrancy and physicality that is a joy to witness, invested Kurtág's vocal lines with passionate clarity, and violinist Geoff Nuttall dispatched his jittery melodic shards and treacherous multiple stops with aplomb.” San Francisco Chronicle
“…and the solo vocal line, an anguished, melodic lament that Ms. Upshaw delivered with her signature crystalline purity and visceral connection to the notes.” The Wall Street Journal
“Ms. Upshaw was at her most moving in ‘She Was Here’, Osvaldo Golijov's inventive orchestrations of four Schubert songs....Schubert's melodies were unchanged, but Ms. Upshaw sang them with a hushed, velvety tone and an irresistible intensity.” The New York Times
“Her splendid singing [of ‘Folk Songs’ by Luciano Berio] made this the kind of evening that the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra folks were likely dreaming of when she signed on as an Artist Partner....Leaping effortlessly across language barriers and chasms of mood, the astounding Upshaw spanned the full breadth of her vocal and emotional range. Upshaw's instrument has the kind of power, clarity and pure beauty that can transfix a listener.” St. Paul Pioneer Press
“Hearing the astonishing soprano Dawn Upshaw weeping, wailing, groaning, growling and cooing her way through Osvaldo Golijov’s ‘Ayre’ was reassuring evidence that this most refined of artists can reinvent herself more smoothly than just about any other singer today.” Chicago Tribune
Joining a rare natural warmth with a fierce commitment to the transforming communicative power of music, Dawn Upshaw has achieved worldwide celebrity as a singer of opera and concert repertoire ranging from the sacred works of Bach to the freshest sounds of today. Her ability to reach to the heart of music and text has earned her both the devotion of an exceptionally diverse audience, and the awards and distinctions accorded to only the most distinguished of artists. In 2007, she was named a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, the first vocal artist to be awarded the five-year “genius” prize, and in 2008 she was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Her acclaimed performances on the opera stage comprise the great Mozart roles (Pamina, Ilia, Susanna, Despina) as well as modern works by Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Messiaen. From Salzburg, Paris and Glyndebourne to the Metropolitan Opera, where she began her career in 1984 and has since made nearly 300 appearances, Dawn Upshaw has also championed numerous new works created for her including The Great Gatsby by John Harbison; the Grawemeyer Award-winning opera, L’Amour de Loin and oratorio La Passion de Simone by Kaija Saariaho; John Adams’s Nativity oratorio El Niño; and Osvaldo Golijov’s chamber opera Ainadamar and song cycle Ayre.
Ms. Upshaw’s 2010-11 season opens with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in performances of Golijov and Canteloube at the Tanglewood Music Festival. She tours Europe in Peter Sellars’s acclaimed production of Kurtag’s “Kafka Fragments”, reprises her celebrated role in John Adams’s El Niño with the San Francisco Symphony, and begins a second three-year term as Artistic Partner with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, with whom she also appears at Carnegie Hall as part of the “Spring For Music” series. She sings world premieres of five new works written for her, including a chamber piece by Donnacha Dennehy and the Crash Ensemble in Dublin, slated for release on Nonesuch Records; a new work by Joan Tower at the Morgan Library as part of a program by the Bard College Conservatory of Music Graduate Vocal Arts Program; a co-commission with the Terezin Foundation and the Prague Spring Festival by Pablo Ortiz; a vocal and chamber orchestra commission from Gabirela Frank for the SPCO; and a jazz-inflected score by Maria Schneider for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, with first performances at the 2011 Ojai Festival where Ms. Upshaw is the Music Director. There she curates and performs a series of concerts with the ACO, as well as a new production by Peter Sellars that features Ms. Upshaw in selections from George Crumb’s “American Songbooks”. Co-produced by Cal Performances, this work is among the highlights of U.C. Berkeley’s Celebrity Series offering, “Ojai North”.
It says much about Dawn Upshaw’s sensibilities as an artist and colleague that she is a favored partner of many leading musicians, including Richard Goode, the Kronos Quartet, James Levine, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. In her work as a recitalist, and particularly in her work with composers, Dawn Upshaw has become a generative force in concert music, having premiered more than 25 works in the past decade. From Carnegie Hall to large and small venues throughout the world she regularly presents specially designed programs composed of lieder, unusual contemporary works in many languages, and folk and popular music. She furthers this work in master classes and workshops with young singers at major music festivals, conservatories, and liberal arts colleges. She is Artistic Director of the Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and a faculty member of the Tanglewood Music Center.
A four-time Grammy Award winner, Dawn Upshaw is featured on more than 50 recordings, including the million-selling Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Gorecki. Her discography also includes full-length opera recordings of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro; Messiaen’s St. Francois d’Assise; Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; John Adams’s El Niño; two volumes of Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne”, and a dozen recital recordings. Her most recent release on Deutsche Grammophon is “Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra”, the third in a series of acclaimed recordings of Osvaldo Golijov’s music.
Dawn Upshaw holds honorary doctorate degrees from Yale, the Manhattan School of Music, Allegheny College, and Illinois Wesleyan University. She began her career as a 1984 winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions and the 1985 Walter W. Naumburg Competition, and was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists Development Program.
© 2012