Dawn Upshaw sings Schubert

May 15, 2010, 8:00 pm

Enmax Hall, Winspear Centre

Dawn Upshaw sings Schubert

2009 Classic Landmarks Masters

  • William Eddins, conductor
    Dawn Upshaw, soprano
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Details

There are few sopranos as versatile, celebrated, or in demand as Dawn Upshaw. She makes her sensational ESO debut singing Osvaldo Golijov’s Three Songs, and his adaptation of four songs by Schubert, all written expressly for her. And carefree, sunny Italy is celebrated in one of Mendelssohn’s most popular and vivacious scores.

Learn more about the performance at Symphony Prelude: 7:15 pm in the Upper Circle (Third Level) Lobby.

Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 "Italian"
Schubert: She Was Here (Four Songs, orch. by Golijov)
Pärt: Fratres
Golijov: Three Songs

click for interactive map $69 Dress Circle (A)
$59 Terrace (B)
$51 Orchestra (C)
$38 Upper Circle (D)
$28 Gallery (E)
$20 Orchestra Front (F)
(click map for interactive version)

Tickets subject to applicable service charges.

This performance will be recorded by CBC Radio for later broadcast.
Thank you to our series sponsor: classic landmarks

Thank you to our media sponsor: ckua

The next Classic Landmarks Masters performance is June 12, 2010.

Program Information


Pärt: Fratres (12')*

Golijov: Three Songs (22')*

Intermission

Schubert: She Was Here (Four Songs, orch. by Golijov) (14')*

Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 in A major, Opus 90 "Italian" (27')*

*Indicates approximate performance duration

Program Notes

Fratres
Arvo Pärt (b. Paide, Estonia, 1935)
 
Original version composed 1977
Tonight’s version arranged in 1992
This is the ESO premiere of the piece
 
Arvo Pärt is certainly the most internationally recognized musical figure from Estonia. His prolific output is dominated by sacred works, but he has written many abstract, purely instrumental compositions. And many of those are works that, in his words, employ “tintinnabulation” (from the Latin word for bell). “I build with primitive materials, with the triad, with one specific tonality,” he has written. “The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation.”
 
Fratres is such a work – or a series of works, actually. Originally composed in 1977 for a chamber ensemble of modern or ancient instruments, Pärt has made the work into a family of pieces over the years, for a wide variety of instrumental combinations, from violin and piano to orchestral versions. Many of these different versions of Fratres are very similar to one another, but some have been significantly re-composed. Tonight’s version, for strings and percussion, dates from 1991. It is dominated by a single, tender and resigned melody repeated with slight variations nine times throughout the work’s duration. These are performed above a drone (the notes “A” and “E”) in the cellos and basses. Between each phrase, there is a brief interval in the percussion (claves and bass drum).
 
 
Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra
Osvaldo Golijov (b. La Plata, Argentina, 1960)
 
First performed: March 2002 in Minneapolis
This is the ESO premiere of the piece
 
“Upshaw performed three songs Osvaldo Golijov wrote for her on three different occasions in three languages and brought together, with new orchestrations, for the Minnesota Orchestra a year ago. The songs are intimate, intense, and haunting, expertly crafted for voice and instruments, and the emotionally overwhelming Emily Dickinson song ends quietly and on a low note. Upshaw sang, as always, with her whole being.”
Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
 
Dawn Upshaw has been a strong supporter of Osvaldo Golijov’s music; she added the piano-voice song Lúa descolorida, later incorporated into Golijov's La Pasión Según San Marcos (“The Passion According to St. Mark”), to her repertoire some years ago, and gave the first performances of the Three Songs (which includes an orchestration of Lúa descolorida).
 
Three Songs opens with music adapted by Golijov from music he had written for the 2000 Sally Potter film The Man Who Cried. This movement begins with a lullaby, the theme of which occurs throughout the film, and is a setting of a text by the director that was then translated into Yiddish. The Gypsy-inflected improvisatory doina (a Rumanian song style) and the fast gallop music that follows were influenced by the composer's friends Taraf de Haïdouks, a group of Gypsy musicians. This music also appears in The Man Who Cried. In the film, the gallop accompanies a scene in which a bicyclist (Christina Ricci) pursues a horseman (Johnny Depp).
 
Lúa descolorida, a lament about the "colourless moon," is a sorrowful aria of the Apostle Peter in Golijov's La Pasión Según San Marcos, sung after Peter has denied knowing Christ three times. However, the text for Lúa descolorida is a poem by Galician poet Rosalia de Castro (1837-1885), rather than from scripture. The original version was for voice and piano, and was orchestrated later for the Pasión, and tonight’s version is similar in scoring to that. 
 
How Slow the Wind is a setting of two short Emily Dickinson poems, and was written by Golijov as his response to the death a friend. "I had in mind one of those seconds in life that is frozen in the memory, forever—a sudden death, a single instant in which life turns upside down, different from the experience of death after a long agony," he wrote of the work. Originally for voice and string quartet, the piece was commissioned by Close Encounters with Music and was first performed in May 2001, with a string quartet accompanying Dawn Upshaw.
 
 
She Was Here (Four Songs by Schubert, orchestrated and with an introduction)
Golijov
 
First performance: April 24, 2008 in St. Paul, Minnesota
This is the ESO premiere of the piece
 
“But (Dawn Upshaw) was at her most moving after the intermission, in She Was Here, Osvaldo Golijov's inventive orchestrations of four Schubert songs. The songs Mr. Golijov chose — "Wandrers Nachtlied," "Lied der Mignon," "Dass sie hier gewesen" and "Nacht und Träume" — are all slow and achingly melancholy, and his orchestrations magnified passions.”
Allan Kozinn, New York Times
 
Of She Was Here, Osvaldo Golijov has written:
“Among the new musical worlds that Schubert predicted are the vastness of Russia; the lyrical minimalism of Philip Glass (as in the slow movement of the Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, the opening of the Fantasy in C for violin and piano, and the beloved song "Nacht und Träume"); the fragility and intimacy of Hugo Wolf, and, beyond him, the ambiguous scent of the Vienna of Alban Berg, 100 years after Schubert's own disappearance (in "Dass Sie Hier Gewesen"); the irony of Stravinsky and Kurt Weill (in "Lied der Mignon"); and, perhaps most daringly, the sound of longing for a sweet, peaceful death ("Wandrers Nachtlied"). 
 
“These orchestrations were written at a time of loss and sadness. But Schubert brings consolation, especially in the last two songs, when he shows that past, present and future, in time, are only illusion. At least while the music lasts.”
 
Golijov’s take on these Schubert lieder leaves the vocal part as it was written in each of the four songs, but recasts the piano accompaniment to bring in the full palette of orchestral colour. It begins with Wandrer’s Nachtlied (“Wayfarer’s Night Song”), evocatively illuminating the longing for a peaceful death, an end to suffering.
 
Mignon is a character from Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (“Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”), a young gypsy woman who suffers at the hands of her master, and who is rescued by the title character, Wilhelm. In Golijov's orchestration of Schubert's Lied der Mignon, the piano part is given an especially other-worldly setting with harp and celeste.
 
Dass sie hier gewesen (“She Was Here”) is one of the most avant garde of all Schubert's songs. There are unexpectedly bold dissonances in the song — barely resolved eleventh chords that anticipate Wagner or Debussy, an almost sinuous structure, verses of radically uneven length (the text is from a poem by Friedrich Ruckert), and modulations far beyond Schubert’s typical musical language.
 
Golijov’s cycle ends with Nacht und Träume (“Night and Dreams”), which opens with flowing strings, with horns and clarinet playing long notes in accompaniment. Triplets in the harp seem to go in steady counter-rhythm. As the song continues, syncopated strings and bass clarinet also provide a propulsive drive.
 
 
Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op.90 “Italian”
Felix Mendelssohn (b. Hamburg, 1809 / d. Leipzig, 1847)
 
First performance: May 13, 1833 in London
Last ESO performance: Sobeys Symphony Under the Sky 2009
 
“…the work of a young man with an energy matched only by his technical facility.”
Donald Tovey, on Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony
 
Not only was the young Mendelssohn supremely gifted musically, he was also blessed with the good fortune to come from a well-to-do family. At the age of 20, he spent nearly five years travelling extensively, drawing inspiration for several major compositions during his excursions.
 
He visited Italy for the first time in 1830, and felt the inhabitants he met, “took a supreme delight in life.” Enraptured by the country and its people, Mendelssohn dashed off the original version of his “Italian” Symphony in what was, for him, great haste. Ever one to question his own work (“It is very much these doubts that disturb me with any new piece,” he wrote to a friend of the first version of the symphony), Mendelssohn greatly revised the last three movements of the symphony following its London premiere in 1833.
 
The overall impression of the work matches the vivacity with which Mendelssohn described the Italians he met. The opening movement bursts out in an extroverted 6/8 main theme. The energy is sustained throughout this movement, though Mendelssohn deftly manipulates the orchestration, creating almost the sense of a dialog. A fugal theme is brought in as the development section, and the main material returns for the recapitulation.
 
The slow movement is in D minor; a stately theme presented over a regular pulse – compared by some to a religious procession, to others a Barcarolle (gondoliler’s song). Both this slow movement, and the lyrical third movement which follows, are in ternary form, and yield to a joyful Italian dance, a Saltarello, in the final movement. Intriguingly, Mendelssohn casts this upbeat movement in A minor as opposed to A Major, drawing wonderful and unexpected colours as a result.
 
Program Notes © 2010 by D.T. Baker

Artist Information

william eddins
William Eddins, conductor

William Eddins is in his fifth season as Music Director of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. A native of Buffalo, New York, he currently resides in Minneapolis with his lovely wife Jen, a clarinetist, and their two boys Raef (AKA Raefster; Munchers) and Riley (AKA Squeaky; The Imp; Dr. No).

Bill has been playing piano since he was five when his parents bought a Wurlitzer Grand piano at a garage sale. He started conducting during his sophomore year at the Eastman School of Music, and most of the '80s were spent trying to decide whether to pursue a career in conducting or piano. The quandary was answered for him when he realized that the life of a poor, starving pianist was for the birds. In 1989 Bill decided to study conducting with Dan Lewis at the University of Southern California, from whence he managed to land assistant conductor posts with the Chicago Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra in 1992.

Bill has many non-musical hobbies including: cooking, eating, discussing food, and planning dinner parties. He is also quite fond of biking, tennis, reading, and pinball. Unfortunately, due to pianistic paranoia his days in the martial arts are long over.

Bill is committed to bringing classical music to the greater public. He has started a podcast – Classical Connections – which is dedicated to exploring the history of classical music and highlights live chamber music performances in which Bill has taken part (check it out for yourself at Bill Eddins' website). He has also produced a solo piano CD – Bad Boys, Volume I – which features Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata and Albright's Nightmare Fantasy Rag. His latest recording, on the Naxos label, features American music for cello and orchestra.

dawn upshawDawn Upshaw, soprano
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 form 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.
 
Ms. Upshaw’s 2009-10 season opened with concerts in Edinburgh, Montreux, Zurich and the Proms featuring the music of Mahler, Berio, and Golijov performed with David Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra.  This season she also sings the world premieres of three new works written for her, including a chamber piece by David Bruce to open the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center season in New York; an orchestral work by Alberto Iglesias with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, where Ms. Upshaw is an Artistic Partner; and a song cycle by Osvaldo Golijov for Ms. Upshaw and Emanuel Ax, with concerts in Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and at Carnegie Hall. Ms. Upshaw appears twice again at Carnegie this season, reprising her celebrated role in John Adams’s El Niño and taking part in a festival celebrating Louis Andriessen. She performs for the first time with the Toronto Symphony, and joins Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for his inaugural season at Disney Hall, among other highlights.
 
This is Ms. Upshaw’s debut with the ESO.

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