A new dawn for Upshaw

Pity me: until Sunday I'd never heard Dawn Upshaw (at left) sing anything live but the work of Osvaldo Golijov, whom I'm hardly crazy about. So the beauty of her luminous voice has always been slightly occluded for me by my complicated response to what that voice was singing. But in Sunday's Celebrity Series concert, the familiar strains of Golijov were heard only once (and in one of his best songs), while we were far more often regaled with melodies from the likes of Ives, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen, and Bolcomb. And the results were pure bliss - a series of musical settings which set off seemingly every facet of Upshaw's radiant instrument. Indeed, despite her recent medical travails (from which she's emerged with a clean bill of health), she seems in better voice than ever.

Well, actually, the concert was almost pure bliss; the audience kind of spoiled its perfection. At one point Upshaw had to pause while an elderly patron adjusted her hearing aid, which had begun to beep. Then later, in the final encore, another patron was actively rude, and actually made a phone call during Upshaw's performance (see sidebar). Oh, well. No rest for the wicked, I suppose. Upshaw proved unflappable, however, and indeed was charming as she ad-libbed, sans attitude, while the rogue hearing aid was attended to.

Then it was back to Upshaw's achingly pure soprano, and, of course, her superb taste and questing musical open-mindedness. The concert began brilliantly, with haunting interpretations of several songs from Charles Ives - "Songs My Mother Taught Me," "Two little flowers (and dedicated to them)," "Down East" - that caught perfectly a wistfulness we rarely associate with this composer. (Upshaw threw in the hilarious "Very Pleasant" to remind us of his wit as well.)

She took a time-out to listen raptly to accompanist Gilbert Kalish's accomplished performance of the "Alcotts" movement from Ives's Second Piano Sonata, then returned with a set of French art-song, including a wonderful performance of Fauré's "Pale dawn" and an intense reading of Debussy's "The Hair." Her bid for exoticism in the same composer's "Pan's flute" was perhaps less successful - she's just too sweetly straightforward; but her interpretation of Ravel's "The swan" was just right - serenely ravishing, with a last fillip of bemused insight. The first half of the concert ended with another intense crescendo, as she limned all the ecstatic power of Messiaen's erotically-charged "Fulfilled prayer."

After intermission, the soprano touched base with Golijov (who was in the audience to cheer her on), but at least it was with one of his best songs, the devastating "Moon, colorless." Then a rather complex set-up began for the concert's premiere - from Michael Ward-Bergeman, who's in Golijov's circle - called "Treny (Laments)". The piece featured a small ensemble of piano, flute, cello, and "hyper-accordion" (played by the composer), which proved to be an accordion amplified and enhanced with deeper bass and various echoes and electronic effects. The intersection of electronica and live, unmediated performance seems to be one of Upshaw's interests, and this sample proved beguiling. Based on a 16th-century poem by Jan Kochanowski on the death of his daughter, its piercing lamentation suited the soprano well (her vibrato-free upper register can project a pure mournfulness sans any affectation); the only real problem with the piece is that it seems overlong, or perhaps more accurately, not satisfyingly structured for its given length.

The concert ended grandly, however, with a delightful set of songs from William Bolcomb (one of my favorite composers) that truly crossed art with pop, and floated lightly between witty, parodistic edge and floods of genuine feeling. "Waitin'" was spiritual yearning made simple, and pure; "The Song of Mad Max" both tickled and chilled; and as for the sweetly funny "Amor" - well, just make sure that before you die you hear this song at least once, and preferably performed by Upshaw. The crowd cried out for an encore, and she returned with another lively turn from Bolcom ("George") and the ever-welcome "Im Frühling" by Schubert, before sending everyone out into the fading day refreshed and renewed as after a long drink from a bright, pure spring.

Of Golijov and global schmaltz

Dawn Upshaw lifts off in Ainadamar.

The Grammy-winning Osvaldo Golijov seems not only to embrace the world, but actually embody a good chunk of it - he's Argentinean, and Jewish, and half-Romanian; he studied music in Israel, but then emigrated to the U.S. - to Newton, MA, in fact. He teaches at Boston Conservatory, but also moves in the boho jet set of Peter Sellars and Dawn Upshaw. And after the popular success of such works as Ayre, and now Ainadamar, he's become the darling of a certain kind of music fan - the kind that adores the idea of fusing the traditions of world music into some overwhelming, amplified mandala - while fusing the worlds of classical music and pop at the same time.

In other words, the kind that isn't me. As I get older, I'm more and more bemused (or is it confused?) by those devoted to the idea of diversity, yet obsessed with a global cultural mash-up which would render real diversity obsolete. I know, I know, they don't see it that way, and they have all the best intentions in the world. But I do see it that way - and as for best intentions, you know what road is paved with them . . .

Such doubts always drive true believers crazy, of course. So I try to explain that I like klezmer. And I like flamenco. But I don't really want to merge them into klezmenco. Aha! the globoculturists say - but isn't the greatest art born of the integration of opposing cultures? Well - sí . . . but also no. Classical music has drawn on folk music for inspiration (Rite of Spring, New World Symphony, etc., etc.), and "Western" painting has often integrated motifs from "the East" (the impact of Hokusai on van Gogh is one great example).

But said cases always entailed a paradigm shift - the final works were not simply quilts of many colors, but a new synthesis. Yet Golijov, at least to these ears, rarely moves beyond highly refined pastiche - and when he does, I'm afraid it's usually toward a new kind of global kitsch; because the real rub is that Golijov is also trying to merge the traditions of "popular" and "serious" music, too. He wants to elevate pop music, yes, but also hang onto its audience. Not for him are the cool insights of, say, Thomas Adès's Asyla (a shockingly successful transference of disco into the concert hall). No, what Golijov wants to do is wail, and then wail some more - he wants to cry us a river, in fact a Danube, a Nile, and a whole lot more.

So I went into Opera Boston's recent production of his first opera, Ainadamar, knowing it was his party, and he was going to cry if he wanted to. And cry he did, basically nonstop through the whole thing. After all, Ainadamar is loosely translated as "Fountain of Tears," and its supposed subject is the death of Frederico García Lorca, the great gay poet/dramatist of Republican Spain who was gunned down by Falangists in 1936 (the olive tree venerated as the site of his death, at right).

Not that the opera has much to do with the actual Lorca (at left). It literally castrates him (this gay man is played by a woman), then transmutes him into a kind of geisha-Christ in a zoot suit. There's no sex with men here, much less anything of his famous affair with Salvador Dalí - and you can forget about any references to surrealism, either, or communism, or his obsession with death, or really anything that made Lorca what he truly was. Instead, we're offered a sweet victim, who, needless to say, cries a river at his/her execution and you know, suffers for us all.

Golijov can get away with all this by conceptualizing his opera as a memory play, as it were, within the mind of one Margarita Xirgu (left), a compatriot of Lorca whom nobody really cares about anymore. Still, the issue of deracination, not the ghost of Lorca, is what haunts the piece. Golijov, of course, is not Spanish (instead, he's "Latin," kind of), and his star, Dawn Upshaw, may be the whitest soprano in the world - she comes off as some kind of multicultural memsahib. The librettist, David Henry Hwang, is Asian-American, and the director, Peter Sellars, likes to wear kimonos. Note there's not a Spaniard in this crowd - and there's only one in the cast.

Should this matter? Well, no, it shouldn't, not if the Asians and Americans (both North and South) and the half-Romanians and quasi-Israelis, etc., have that Andalusian thang goin' on. But most of them don't. Dawn Upshaw keeps reaching down into her gypsy soul and coming up with not much (and we keep wishing she'd stop overacting and go back to Mozart, where she belongs), while Sellars groups his singers in Greek-tragedy choruses, in which they perform Martha-Graham-like moves. And while Hwang's libretto has by most accounts "gotten better," it still has pretty far to go.

Of course one could argue the whole point isn't really to channel the tragic gypsy fires of Spain; it is, instead, to solemnly enact the political pain of earnest Western multiculturalists. And at this, Ainadamar succeeds brilliantly. Indeed, particularly in its second act, the opera operates very effectively as a kind of rarefied global schmaltz. A lump will rise in your throat, and you will blink back tears - because Golijov (at left) comes through, even if no one else does.

Not that I'm suddenly going out to buy his CDs, mind you. I wouldn't say the music from Ainadamar is actually interesting, not yet - but you can't deny its occasional power. The muezzin-like call that summons Lorca to his execution is chilling, and the ensuing descending vocal line of the word ainadamar is truly haunting. Indeed, Golijov seems to have been somehow invigorated by the entire scene, as he conjures for it a series of eerily mournful textures that in their originality made me forget all about Ayre. Suddenly I began to wonder if Golijov might indeed prove a major composer, instead of just a Grammy-winning one. Even Sellars and Hwang score a dramatic coup, when they have Lorca rise again and again from his grave (like the eternal hope for freedom), only to be mown down by his assassin.

So count me half-converted, although my advice to Golijov would be to drop the whole multicultural crowd and just concentrate on the culture, the drama, instead. Get yourself more Latin singers, not white Mozart specialists trying to tango (Upshaw was upstaged by her co-stars, Kelley O'Connor and Jessica Rivera, anyway). Stop trying to get us to all join hands; don't worry, the world can go buy a Coke all by itself. Meanwhile there are real songs and real operas to write.