Voice for a powerful message

By refusing to be overwhelmed by musical assumptions, by New York City and even by a recent serious illness, American singer Dawn Upshaw has kept to her own singular creative path. She talks to MICHAEL DERVANahead of her concert in Dublin this weekend

IT’S AN EASY cliche to emphasise the glamour in meeting a singer whose career tally includes four Grammy awards, more than 50 recordings and more than 300 appearances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. That singer would be Dawn Upshaw.

But diva-style glamour is simply not her thing, unless, of course, a particular piece or role should require her to assume it. In person, Upshaw is down to earth, rooted, true.

We meet up for breakfast at the Popover Cafe on New York’s Amsterdam Avenue. Scrambled eggs with an Americanised Yorkshire pudding is a strange sight to European eyes. But strange food is an essential part of the travel experience, global village notwithstanding. And adaptation, it turns out, is a key part of the Upshaw musical approach. Classical music was not where she started from.

“My musical history, the music played in my home, was not classical music,” she says. “I came to classical music more in college. At the time I started in college I was interested in music theatre. That’s what I wanted to do. But I just kind of took a different path during my college years, learnt different music, got very excited about it.”

Her description is self-deprecating. “I knew music was what I wanted to try to do. I didn’t believe for sure that I would be able to do it. In fact, I don’t think I ever was sure. I think most people who are studying music, and have hopes to make a living at it these days, don’t ever know for sure that’s really going to be possible. But I felt very strongly about trying to make it possible.”

She was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and studied at Illinois Wesleyan University before arriving in New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music. Becoming a success, of course, is not just a matter of ability, career savviness or luck. Things that made a difference for her included “certain mentors” and “knowing what kind of music I liked, and feeling pretty strongly about a particular part of the repertoire, including new music. Especially when I came to New York, I realised that, for me and my make-up, who I am, it was important to sort of stay in my own world and not become overwhelmed, to remain focused and not get caught up in the spin of the business.”

What was it that might have overwhelmed her? “Just the fast pace of New York City,” she says. “The number of voice students at the Manhattan School of Music, where I was getting my Masters. It seemed to me that, for a lot of students of singing and a lot of teachers of singing, the priority was all about sound. That’s not what’s most important to me. I felt kind of like I was trying to keep a hold of my own ideals, I guess.”

She came from a family that sang folk music and civil rights songs in the 1960s, and singing new music was also a perfectly normal activity.

“You know, I had been working on new music, fresh music, since my undergrad years,” she says. “I had a voice teacher and choral director – the same man, who ended up being my father-in-law – who had new pieces commissioned for the choir every year. And he threw new pieces at me.

“I didn’t think there was anything unusual about that, and I didn’t know that it was atypical, really, until I got to New York for graduate school. It seemed to make perfect sense to me that I was alive and that I would sing music written by people that were still alive.

“For a few years, my sister and I and my parents performed as a family in the school in the district where we lived. It was mostly folk music, civil rights-type music. That was my musical upbringing. And I think that informed my music-making into college too. Because the message was powerful. And the message should be powerful – I’m speaking now of the text. And it also made sense that the music had power with the message to change, or to somehow move someone to feel something they hadn’t felt before they heard the music, or even to act and do something that they wouldn’t have necessarily done before they heard the music.

“To live in a world solely of old music just wouldn’t have made and doesn’t make sense to me.”

IT WAS A piece by a living composer which catapulted Upshaw into the international limelight, when her recording of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No 3, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, became a bestseller in the early 1990s. A more apt success would be hard to imagine – the second movement is a setting of a text scratched on a cell wall in 1944 by an 18-year-old Polish girl, held prisoner by the Gestapo.

Upshaw has also recorded Olivier Messiaen's opera, Saint François d'Assise(her first encounter with the work in the early 1990s was a life-changing experience), John Adams's nativity oratorio, El Niño, Kaija Saariaho's opera, L'amour de loin, and, more recently, a number of works by Osvaldo Golijov, whose music seems to cross boundaries as freely as Upshaw herself.

You will be able to add Donnacha Dennehy to that list next year, when Upshaw will premiere a new work with the Crash Ensemble.

Working with composers is a huge stimulus, and although you might expect that an exacting composer might restrict a performer, Upshaw finds it liberating.

“I guess I feel a little more freedom with the living composers.” she says. “I think it’s interesting, the more information I have, the more freedom I feel like I have. Of course, we all sort of guess, and we know a fair amount about the performance practices and what was intended by a particular musical gesture from music written long ago. But it’s not the same as having the composer right there to speak with.”

In Upshaw’s National Gallery concert this weekend, Golijov’s work rubs shoulders with that of Bernstein, Rodgers and Sondheim. And bridging the gap between Broadway and the repertoire of the typical classical song recital is something Upshaw carries off with unusual success. In her world, she says, Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin and Stravinsky are closer than Messiaen and Purcell. “I feel that it’s a matter of style, and of all of the tools that we use in trying to sing with the most accurate style. In Bach, for instance, those tools include how a note is approached, how it’s left, how you use vibrato, how you use pitch, how you use diction. All of those are the same tools, really, that you use when you’re singing a Broadway song. And it’s a matter of understanding what the style’s about.

“But also, I come from that. My musical upbringing was more from that world of music theatre, folk music, so perhaps it’s understandable that I would feel some connection to all of that. I think that’s true for a lot of my colleagues now, people of my generation.”

IT’S ALWAYS TEMPTING to talk to singers about “the voice”, often spoken about as if it were a thing apart, even though it is something, of course, from which they are actually inseparable. My question about her relationship with her voice raises a laugh that’s long and deep.

“Ever since I’ve lowered my expectations of my voice,” she explains, “we get along much better. I feel like I’ve been through a lot with my voice. Why not? You have to remember that, in a way, it’s like a dancer or an athlete. Injuries happen. You have to learn about your own personal weaknesses, and take care of yourself as best you can with those in mind.

“Also, you have to have incredible patience. All of those things can be pretty difficult for something you can’t see. It’s not in your hand or your arm. You can’t see it all, what’s going on while you’re doing it.”

Is it a high-maintenance problem? “I can’t deal with high- maintenance anything in my life. No, I won’t, I won’t do that. I think, once I had children especially, there was no way I was going to start worrying about catching something every time I gave them a hug or a kiss. That went out the window. Actually, I think I’ve been better off ever since.

“There are really just two things that I have to do to take care of it, and it sounds really boring: drink a lot of water and get a good amount of sleep. If I do those things, I can pretty much count on my voice performing a certain way for me.”

She says she actually enjoys the changes brought by the passing of the years. “Some of them have allowed me, I think, to sing in my lower range with a more focused sound as I’m getting older. Things change and life moves on, and there’s always something incredible and gorgeous to discover. I’ve never really feared the changes.

“I go through phases of taking really good care of myself, and then my health situation in the last couple of years really threw me for a loop, as they say.”

In 2006 she was diagnosed with early breast cancer, from which she is currently clear. “I’m still kind of making my way back after all of that,” she says. “I know that I feel better and I think that I enjoy my work more when I’m getting some really good regular exercise. I actually feel that in terms of my voice and my vocal cords, that they are in better shape than they’ve been in a long time. The rest of my body, I feel that I don’t have the same energy, I don’t have that back yet. All of the rest from singing helps when you come back to singing.”

It’s changed other things, too. “I’m sure that I do approach everything in my life a little bit differently because of the experience,” she says. “It’s funny, because I think I wanted, I even spoke in the beginning like I wanted, some sort of epiphany. I wanted this to have meaning. I didn’t want to go through this without it having meaning.

“I’m not sure I could tell you now that I think it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. But it puts things in a different perspective that I think is healthier for me. It’s affected my appreciation for a kind of no-bullshit approach to life. I think I always wanted that anyway, but I think I have less patience for artifice, for things that don’t feel true. I don’t have time.”

Dawn Upshaw’s Music for Museums concert with the Knights Chamber Orchestra under Eric Jacobsen, National Gallery this Sat, May 23, tel: 01-6633518