_______{EQUALLY AT HOME WITH MOZART}
___{AND GERSHWIN, DAWN UPSHAW IS A}
_________{RARITY AMONG CLASSICAL SINGERS.}

BY JAMIE JAMES | "When opera singers try to expand their repertoire into the popular realm, they usually humiliate themselves -- except when they sing the folk songs of their native lands. Some of Jussi Björling's finest recordings are those of Swedish folk songs; Enrico Caruso will be remembered as much for his Neapolitan songs as for any of his stage roles. The great British contralto Kathleen Ferrier was criticized for singing English folk ballads such as "I Know Where I'm Going" and "Blow the Wind Southerly," on the grounds that they were "artistically inferior," yet her recordings of them have proved to be her most beloved legacy.

Dawn Upshaw, the finest American soprano of her generation, grew up in Park Forest, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, and the folk music there is the American pop song: Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, the Broadway tunes of Blitzstein, Bernstein and Sondheim (there's a limerick or a law firm in there somewhere). While continuing to create new roles for the opera stage, Upshaw, in the middle of her career, has discovered the classic pop songs of her parents' and grandparents' generation, and performs them in a classy style that re-creates what they might have sounded like when they were new.

We have become accustomed to hearing most of these standards performed by jazz musicians: "Thou Swell" swings when Ella Fitzgerald sings it; Chet Baker finds every blue note in "Someone to Watch Over Me." But they were written for the stage, and were originally sung by Broadway babies backed up by a brassy Broadway orchestra. Upshaw's pure, limpid soprano, liquid sunshine, is ideal for this repertoire, and her acting experience in opera has honed her diction and delivery to the point that Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart seem wittier than ever.

Upshaw and her producer at Nonesuch Records, Tommy Krasker, go about their work in an almost scholarly way. Their most recent collaboration, "Dawn Upshaw Sings Vernon Duke," is a good example. Vernon Duke (1903-69), born Vladimir Alexandrovitch Dukelsky, composed ballets for Diaghilev and symphonic works for Koussevitzky that are now forgotten. And after he emigrated to America, he wrote pop songs such as "April in Paris" and "I Like the Likes of You," which will be heard as long as men and women want to go on dates and drink cocktails. Some people, fancying themselves purists, object that Upshaw's performances of these pop songs are too pretty, lacking the grit and verve that the material requires. But that's just the point: Duke wrote "I Like the Likes of You" for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934, and Upshaw's recording recaptures the lilting, goofy charm the tune might have had on its first night out. Light lyric sopranos such as Barbara Cook and Julie Andrews are Broadway every bit as much as Ethel Merman.

Upshaw's career, thus far, has been remarkable for its creative vigor and complete absence of errors. Over the past 12 years, I have interviewed most of the major opera stars in the world, and I can state without hesitation (and without naming names) that, as a group, few of them are highly intelligent people. I don't say they're dumb, but like athletes and dancers, their gift is one of the flesh, not of the mind. If they're lucky enough to find good management, they put together a portfolio of a dozen roles that suit them, and stick with them to the ends of their careers. Others blunder into repertoire that is completely wrong for them: the lyric soprano who inexplicably imagines herself as a Wagnerian heroine, the Verdi tenor who always wanted to try his hand at Viennese operetta.

Upshaw is one of a handful of classical singers whose genius lies as much in her choice of material as in the delivery of it. The careers of most opera singers are as good as the advice they receive; yet hers, almost from the beginning, has unfolded as though following a script. "From the beginning," she says thoughtfully, "I've had a certain vision of how I wanted things to go. Sometimes I feel I'm one step ahead. In my relationships with my managers, record companies and so forth, I've been fortunate enough to be in the lead, walking ahead."

Like all young musicians, she had to establish her talent before she was able to exert that sort of control. In Upshaw's case the gift was so readily apparent that it was a relatively swift process. She grew up in a musical family, but not the sort that usually leads to the opera stage. Born in Nashville, Tenn., and raised in Park Forest, as a child she performed folk music and sang civil-rights protest songs with her parents and sister. Calling themselves the Upshaw Family Singers, they played at churches and town halls. They were a close-knit family: In 1972, at the age of 12, when she attended the famed Interlochen music camp (she was an oboe player at the time), instead of staying at the dorms like the other kids, she went camping on the dunes by Lake Michigan with her mother.

She discovered classical music while studying music at Illinois Wesleyan University with the man who would eventually become her father-in-law, musicologist David Nott. "Suddenly I was entering this new world of music and thinking, Wow! This was a world and a repertory I needed to investigate. The possibilities seemed endless." After graduating from college, she attended the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with the legendary voice teacher Ellen Faull. Even more influential, perhaps, were the summers she spent at the Aspen Festival, where she studied with the late American mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani. DeGaetani instilled in her a love of contemporary music, and taught her that in all vocal music, the text is supreme.

In 1984 Upshaw won a place in the Young Artists Development program of the Metropolitan Opera. Later that year she made her debut with the company in "Rigoletto," in the role of the Countess Ceprano. "I had two lines," she recalls with a chuckle. Thus began and ended her career as a Verdian; she has never had any use for the standard Romantic repertoire that most opera singers concentrate on.

Within five years, she had established herself as the Met's leading soubrette (pace la Battle), distinguishing herself in romantic, girlish Mozart roles such as Susanna in "Figaro" and Pamina in "The Magic Flute." James Levine, the Met's music director, made a project of her. As early as 1986, he brought her to Berlin for a debut at the Philharmonie, in Mahler's Symphony No. 4. He also cast her in two Wagner roles at the Met: as the Wood Bird in "Siegfried" and the Shepherd Boy in "Tannhauser." They're tiny roles -- the Wood Bird is actually sung offstage -- but the radiant freshness of her voice, sparkling with youth, made Upshaw ideal for the parts.

Any other opera singer of her stature would be far too grand to sing the Shepherd Boy's hymn to May, an exquisite ditty lasting scarcely a minute, but she returned to the Met to sing the part just last season. "In the Met production, they don't use makeup for the Shepherd Boy, and since I wear my hair short anyway, I can just step into the costume and sing. I feel like there's nothing between me and the audience. There's something really pure about it."

N E X T_P A G E .|.A diva who still scrubs her own bathroom

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