No stranger when it comes to new music, soprano Dawn Upshaw should be in her element as soloist for the world premiere of Robert Beaser's "The Heavenly Feast" in three performances with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra beginning Thursday.
Known for her ability to slide with ease from new pieces to the established repertory, Ms. Upshaw will do more than perform this BSO-commissioned piece. She'll also sing three concert arias by Mozart, and selections from Wagner's "Die Meistersinger." On its own, the orchestra will perform Schubert's Symphony No. 5.
For "The Heavenly Feast," the American composer Beaser uses a text from a 1984 poetry collection, "The Lamp-Lit Answer," by his friend, poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. This poem honors French philosopher Simone Weil, who starved herself to death during World War II to protest the Nazi occupation of her country. Its themes of suffering and self-sacrifice are as reflective as they are dramatic.
"I do seem drawn to music that has some sort of spiritual component," says Ms. Upshaw, from a hotel room in St. Louis. She's cheerful and open as she acknowledges this, but clearly the 34-year-old singer has a more meditative and private side, too.
Audiences at New York's Metropolitan Opera encountered this aspect of her last February when she portrayed the nun Blanche de la Force in Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites." This character's spiritual questing is something pure and beautiful to behold.
The CD-buying public knows Ms. Upshaw for her collaboration with BSO music director David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta on the 1992 recording of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, which has sold more than 500,000 copies so far. Their recording of this "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," which was composed in 1976, became a surprise hit on the British pop charts. Ms. Upshaw still isn't sure why.
"I find it incredibly moving and effective music, and it was a very memorable experience for me and David to meet Gorecki.
"But this symphony had been around a while and I never thought more than 5,000 or 10,000 people would go out and buy it. So it's been especially nice to have it selling so well. I still don't know what sparked its success other than to say it came out at the right time in terms of the needs of the people. They found some sort of solace and peace in it."
On the spiritual level, she obviously gets along well with Mr. Zinman on stage and in the recording studio. Witness the recording she, Mr. Zinman and the Orchestra of St. Luke's made of Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," and works by Harbison, Menotti and Stravinsky, which won a 1989 Grammy Award.
Unfortunately, Mr. Zinman will not be leading the BSO for this week's concerts. Suffering from fatigue after the orchestra's grinding four-week Far East tour, he has been ordered to rest by his doctor.
James Paul, music director of the Baton Rouge Symphony, will conduct.
Although she has been praised for the actorly conviction she brings to both art songs and operatic roles, Ms. Upshaw says, "I don't have a certain dramatic approach when I'm working on a piece. I don't go through the same stages as an actor would preparing a part."
However intuitive the learning process can be, the results are well thought out. Ms. Upshaw seems in full command of her moves on stage and in the studio.
By way of award-recognition proof, her recording "The Girl with Orange Lips," featuring chamber music by Delage, de Falla, Ravel and Stravinsky, won her a Grammy Award in 1991.
Having proved herself versatile and daring in the classical field, she has zestfully entered into the Broadway musical mainstream with "I Wish It So," her new album of theater songs by Bernstein, Blitzstein, Sondheim and Weill under conductor Eric Stern.
Her approach here, she explains, was "not to do their greatest hits, but to do some of their great songs which people don't know so well. There also are a couple of their hit tunes. I like to do that kind of mix."
Her enthusiasm for contemporary music must have something to do with being what seems like an all-American youth in the 1960s and '70s. As a teen-ager in suburban Chicago, she loved singing Peter, Paul and Mary folk songs; with other family members, she performed civil rights and folk songs in local public schools.
Young Dawn played the guitar, studied the oboe, was a cheerleader, read Anne Morrow Lindbergh's inspirational "Gift From the Sea," listened to Joni Mitchell and Barbra Streisand, and thought maybe she'd have a career in musical theater.
While attending Illinois Wesleyan University, where her voice teacher, David Nott, would later become her father-in-law, she familiarized herself with the song literature she now knows so well.
She then studied with mezzo soprano Jan DeGaetani at the Aspen Festival, moved to New York in 1982, attended the Manhattan School of Music.
Within a few years, she won both the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and the Walter Naumburg Vocal Competition, was invited by James Levine to join the studio of the Metropolitan Opera, and gave her first recital at Alice Tully Hall.
Although her subsequent career has kept her busy, she's been spending more time at the Westchester County, N.Y., home she shares with her musicologist husband, Michael Nott, 5-year-old daughter Sadie and 6-month-old son Gabriel.
If audiences for her recent recitals have sensed how profoundly motherhood has affected her, it's because children's songs are apt to show up on the program.
During her recital at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater in 1992, for instance, she departed from the printed program and sang five lullabies. And she hopes to some day make a recording of such music.
"I will definitely do that project -- hopefully before Gabriel goes to college. I try out a fair number of lullabies on my children now."
DAWN UPSHAW
Where: Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St.
When: Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8:15 p.m. The "Uncommon Concert" on Saturday includes performer commentary and post-concert dancing in the lobby.
Tickets: $17 to $34 (box seats $48)
Call: (410) 783-8000
'I WISH IT SO'
To hear excerpts from Dawn Upshaw's "I Wish It So," call Sundial, The Sun's telephone information service, at (410) 783-1800. In Anne Arundel County, call 268-7736; in Harford County, 836-5028; in Carroll County, 848-0338. Using a touch-tone phone, punch in the four-digit code 6121 after you hear the greeting.