Dawn Upshaw (born July 17, 1960) is an American soprano described as "one of the most consequential performers of our time" by the Los Angeles Times.^{[citation needed]} The recipient of several Grammy Awards and Edison Prize-winning discs, Upshaw is at home both in opera and art song, and in repertoire from Baroque to contemporary. Many composers, including Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho, have written for her, and her artistic achievements are extensive. In 2007 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.^[1]

Overview[link]

Upshaw was born in Nashville, Tennessee. She began her vocal career as a talented Rich East High School singer in Park Forest, Illinois and later attended Interlochen Arts Academy. Upshaw received a B.A. in 1982 from Illinois Wesleyan University, where she studied voice with the late Dr. David Nott. She went on to study voice with Ellen Faull at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, earning her M.M. in 1984. She also attended courses given by Jan DeGaetani at the Aspen (Colorado) Music School. She was a winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions (1984) and the Walter M. Naumburg Competition (1985), and was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists Development Program. Since her start in 1984, Upshaw has made more than 300 appearances at the Metropolitan Opera.

Upshaw came to international fame with her million-selling recording (1993), with David Zinman, of the hauntingly powerful Symphony No 3 by Henryk Górecki, known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Symfonia pieśni żałosnych).

In the past decade she has premiered more than 25 new works and has embraced several works created for her, including the Grawemeyer Award-winning opera L’Amour de Loin by Kaija Saariaho, The Great Gatsby by John Harbison, the nativity oratorio El Niño by John Adams, and Osvaldo Golijov's highly acclaimed chamber opera Ainadamar and song cycle Ayre. In 2009 she premiered David Bruce's song cycle The North Wind was a Woman at the gala opening of the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Centre's season.

Some feel that her rendition of Golijov's Ayre made her almost seem a charismatic rock-singer. It is a tribute to her vocal range, as well as her star-stature, that she has moved out of the traditional role of a classical singer. In addition to her operatic recordings, she has also sung the title role in the first complete recording of the score of Gershwin's Oh, Kay!.^[2]

She has also recorded albums of songs by Vernon Duke and Rodgers and Hart.^[3] Upshaw was a guest of President of the United States Bill Clinton and Mrs. Clinton on the NBC special, Christmas in Washington. The BBC presented a prime-time telecast of her 1996 London Proms Concert, "Dawn at Dusk", in which she performed songs from the American musical theater. Her engagements with James Levine over the years led to a 1997 recording of Debussy songs.

She tours regularly with piano accompanist Richard Goode. Margo Garrett and Gilbert Kalish are also long-standing partners. She has worked with the director Peter Sellars many times, including his staging of Händel's Theodora at Glyndebourne, his Paris production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen's month-long residency at the Théâtre du Châtelet) (1996), a staging of Bach's cantata BWV 199, presented in the 1995-96 season at New York's 92nd Street Y, and the Salzburg Festival production of Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise (1998). Ms. Upshaw has often performed as a soloist at the annual Ojai Music Festival in Ojai, CA; most recently in 2006, 2008 and 2009.

Dawn Upshaw joined the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra as Artistic Partner beginning with the 2007-08 season, and she is Artistic Director of the Graduate Program in Vocal Arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, which accepted its first students in the 2006-2007 academic year. She also is a faculty member at the Tanglewood Music Center.

She holds honorary Doctor of Arts, honoris causa, from Yale University, the Manhattan School of Music, Illinois Wesleyan University and Allegheny College.

Upshaw is divorced and a mother of two. She lives near New York.

Upshaw was diagnosed with and treated for early-stage breast cancer in 2006.^[4]

Awards and recognitions[link]

2007 MacArthur Fellow^[1]

2006 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording:

• The Atlanta Symphony and Chorus with Dawn Upshaw for Golijov: Ainadamar (Fountain of Tears)

2003 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance:

• The Kronos Quartet & Dawn Upshaw for Berg: Lyric Suite

1991 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Soloist:

• Dawn Upshaw, artist for The Girl with Orange Lips (Falla, Ravel, etc.)

1989 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Soloist:

• Dawn Upshaw, artist for Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (Music of Barber, Menotti, Harbison, Stravinsky)

Works (selection)[link]

• 1992: Symphony No. 3 (Henryk Górecki), Nonesuch/Elektra Records 79282

References[link]

External links[link]

• NewMusicBox: Dawn Upshaw in conversation with Frank J. Oteri, 2002
• Dawn Upshaw in Conversation from WGBH Radio Boston
• A biography
• IMG Artists

Osvaldo Noé Golijov (born December 5, 1960)^[1] is an Argentine Grammy award–winning composer of classical music.

Biography[link]

Osvaldo Golijov (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈɡolixof]) was born in and grew up in La Plata, Argentina,^[1] in a Jewish family that had emigrated to Argentina in the 1920s from Romania and Russia.^[2][3]

Golijov has developed a rich musical language, the result of a lifetime of experience with various types of music. His Romanian Jewish parents exposed him to the traditional Klezmer music and liturgical music of their faith. Growing up and going to public school in Argentina showed him the many musical styles of his family's adopted country, including the tango. Once Golijov traveled abroad to continue his studies, the influences of other people and other styles became part of him. What is considered so remarkable about his musical language is that, rather than a pastiche of styles, it is wholly cohesive. It is thought of as vibrant and alive, growing and changing as he does.^[4]

Golijov's mother was a piano teacher, his father, a physician. He was raised "surrounded by chamber classical music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the new tango of Ástor Piazzolla," according to his official website. He studied piano at the local conservatory in La Plata and studied composition with Gerardo Gandini.

In 1983, Golijov moved to Israel, where he studied with Mark Kopytman at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy. Three years later, he moved to the United States of America with his wife, Silvia. There he studied with American composer George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania before receiving his doctorate.^[1]

Golijov is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship^[1] and the Vilcek Prize, among other awards and commissions.^[1] He collaborates closely with conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya; vocalists Luciana Souza and Biella de Costa; cellists Yo-Yo Ma, Alisa Weilerstein, Maya Beiser and Matt Haimovitz; the kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor and percussionist Jamey Haddad; ensembles including the Atlanta Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, Silk Road Ensemble and eighth blackbird; the artist Gronk, playwright David Henry Hwang, and directors Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Sellars. He has been composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Merkin Hall in New York, the Spoleto Festival USA, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Music Alive series, Marlboro Music School and Festiva, Ravinia Festival, and several other festivals. In 2010, he composed a commissioned work for 35 American orchestras titled Sidereus, honoring the seventeenth century Italian astronomer Galileo.^[5] and dedicated to an industry official Henry Fogel, who was once described by scholar Norman Lebrecht as "a suit once hired by the Arts Council to abolish London orchestras..."^[6]

Charges of musical plagiarism were leveled at Golijov after Tom Manoff, a composer and critic, and Brian McWhorter, a trumpeter, discovered that Sidereus consists mainly of music from the Michael Ward-Bergeman composition Barbeich. Alex Ross of the New Yorker reviewed both scores and wrote "To put it bluntly, “Sidereus” is “Barbeich” with additional material attached." ^[7] A consortium of thirty-five orchestras paid Golijov $75,000 to write a 20-minute work; a fee supplemented by a $50,000 grant approved by the then board of the League of American Orchestras. ^[8]The final work that Golijov produced and gave to the consortium of orchestras is a 9-minute work. Golijov also used that same musical material in his 2009 composition Radio.

Golijov is Loyola Professor of Music at the College of the Holy Cross at Worcester, Massachusetts, where he has taught since 1991.^[9] He is also on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory.^[1] He has three children.^[10]

Golijov's music[link]

Golijov and composers Sofia Gubaidulina, Tan Dun, and Wolfgang Rihm were commissioned by the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart to write pieces for the Passion 2000 project in commemoration of Johann Sebastian Bach. Golijov's contribution was La Pasión según San Marcos (The Passion according to St. Mark).

He has also composed and arranged works for the Kronos Quartet and the St. Lawrence String Quartet.^[1] He frequently works with Venezuelan conductor Maria Guinand, who conducted the world premieres of Oceana (commissioned by the Oregon Bach Festival, 1996) and La Pasión según San Marcos (Stuttgart's European Music Festival, 2000); classical and Klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer; and American soprano Dawn Upshaw, who performed premieres of his new opera, Ainadamar (and Arias and Ensembles derived from it) at the Santa Fe Opera Festival in 2005, London's Barbican Arts Centre in 2006 and Opera Boston in 2007. His first movie soundtrack experience was for Sally Potter's 2000 film The Man Who Cried. More recently he composed for Francis Ford Coppola's movie Youth Without Youth,^[11] and original music for Coppola's films Tetro^[12] and Twixt.^[13]

Golijov received two Grammys in the Grammy Awards of 2007—the Best Opera Recording for Ainadamar: Fountain of Tears and Best Classical Contemporary Composition for the same opera.^[14] Golijov also received a Grammy nomination in 2002 for Yiddishbbuk.^[15]

Deadline controversy[link]

Golijov came under scrutiny in 2011 for a series of high-profile commissions that were either delayed or cancelled. A violin concerto written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic was not completed in time,^[16] and had to be replaced on the program. A second deadline was missed the following year in Berlin ^[17]. This followed a similar cancellation in 2010, when a song cycle that was scheduled had to be removed from the program when it was not complete in time.^[18] The March 2011 premiere of a new string quartet for the St. Lawrence Quartet was also delayed due to a missed deadline.^[19]

Discography[link]

• Tetro (soundtrack) (Deutsche Grammophon, 2009)
• Youth Without Youth (soundtrack) (Deutsche Grammophon, 2007)
• Oceana (Deutsche Grammophon, 2007)
• Ainadamar (Deutsche Grammophon, Dawn Upshaw, Robert Spano, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra)
• Ayre (Deutsche Grammophon CD 00289 477 5414)
• La Pasión según San Marcos The Passion according to St. Mark (Hänssler Classic 98404, 2001)
• La Pasión según San Marcos The Passion according to St. Mark (two versions: live performance on DVD, Holland Festival, Amsterdam, 22 June 2008 and studio CD, Caracas, both performances are on Deutsche Grammophon B0014008-00)
• Yiddishbbuk (EMI Classics 57356-2)
• The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind performed by the Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79444)
• Nuevo arrangements for the Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79649)
• The Man Who Cried (soundtrack) (Sony Classical SK 61870)^[20]
• Caravan arrangements for the Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79490)
• Voices of Light Golijov's composition Lúa Descolorida sung by soprano Dawn Upshaw (Nonesuch 79812)
• Night Prayers Golijov's composition K'vakarat on recording of the Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79346)
• World to Come Golijov's composition Mariel played by cellist Maya Beiser (Koch Int'l Classics B0000CABC4)
• Goulash composition Oración Lucumí on recording by the cellist Matt Haimovitz (Oxingale)
• Anthem Golijov's composition Omaramor on recording by cellist Matt Haimovitz (Oxingale 1238)
• Klezmer Concertos and Encores composition Rocketekya on recording of klezmer music (Naxos B0000C508L)
• Borromeo String Quartet Living Archive February 29, 2004 (CD/DVD/VHS) Golijov's compositions Yiddishbbuk and Tenebrae
• Voices of Our Time – Dawn Upshaw (DVD) Golijov's composition Lúa Descolorida (TDK VTDU)

Film composer[link]

• The Man Who Cried (2000)
• 11'09"01 September 11 (2002)
• Youth Without Youth (2007)
• Tetro (2009)
• The Oath (2010)
• Twixt (2011, with Dan Deacon)

References[link]

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} "Osvaldo Golijov: Biography". http://www.osvaldogolijov.com/bio.htm. Retrieved 2011-07-28. 
2. ^ Terauds, John (2010-02-25). "Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov follows his intuition". Toronto: thestar.com. http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/article/770499--argentine-composer-osvaldo-golijov-follows-his-intuition. Retrieved 2010-02-25. 
3. ^ "Osvaldo Golijov: La Pásion según San Marcos". laphil.com. http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/piece-detail.cfm?id=2929. Retrieved 2010-03-15. 
4. ^ "Official website of Osvaldo Golijov". osvaldogolijov.com. http://www.osvaldogolijov.com/wd45n.htm. Retrieved 2010-07-09. 
5. ^ Horsley, Paul. "HOMAGE TO HENRY: Orchestras, League commission top composer to honor visionary leader". Kansas City Independent. http://www.kcindependent.com/2011/03/7053/. Retrieved 28 July 2011. 
6. ^ Lebrecht, Norman. "A Walk on the Web Side". La Scena Musicale Online. http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/061108-NL-walk.html. Retrieved 25 May 2012. 
7. ^ |url=http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/02/osvaldo-golijov-sidereus.html%7C
8. ^ |url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/arts/music/osvaldo-golijov-fracas-over-sidereus-overture.html%7C
9. ^ "Osvaldo Golijov Named Loyola Professor of Music at Holy Cross". http://www.holycross.edu/publicaffairs/features/2007-2008/golijov_loyolaprofessorship. Retrieved 2008-05-27. 
10. ^ Beggy, Carol; Shanahan, Mark (2006-10-27). "Newton composer bowls over Bowie". The Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/ae/celebrity/articles/2006/10/27/newton_composer_bowls_over_bowie/. Retrieved 2006-12-03. 
11. ^ Youth without Youth at the Internet Movie Database
12. ^ Tetro at the Internet Movie Database
13. ^ Twixt at the Internet Movie Database
14. ^ "Yahoo! Music 49th GRAMMY Awards Winners in the Classical Category". http://music.yahoo.com/promo-25023071-101-20051208-114. Retrieved 2006-02-12. 
15. ^ "YIDDISHBBUK NOMINATED FOR TWO GRAMMY AWARDS". St. Lawrence String Quartet. http://slsq.com/news/yiddishbbuk-nominated-two-grammy-awards). Retrieved 28 July 2011. 
16. ^ http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2011/03/golly_flunks_on_the_dude.html
17. ^ http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2012/03/exclusive-golijov-withdraws-his-violin-concerto-from-berlin.html
18. ^ "Los Angeles Philharmonic hit by Wave of Cancellations by Artists". Los Angeles Times. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/03/los-angeles-philharmonic-hit-by-wave-of-cancellations-by-artists.html. Retrieved 2011-03-15. 
19. ^ Kozinn, Allan (2011-03-09). "St. Lawrence String Quartet At Zankel Hall Review". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/arts/music/st-lawrence-string-quartet-at-zankel-hall-review.html. Retrieved 2011-03-15. 
20. ^ Crebo, Anna (2002-11-01). "Osvaldo Golijov: A busy composer finds it all a little 'scary.'". American Record Guide. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-26724701_ITM. Retrieved 2009-02-10. 

External links[link]

• Official website of Osvaldo Golijov
• Interview with Osvaldo Golijov, 2008, from Habitus: A Diaspora Journal
• Osvaldo Golijov discusses his opera, Aidanamar from WGBH Radio Boston
• Osvaldo Golijov at the Internet Movie Database
• NPR's Tom Huizenga names La Pasión Según San Marcos one of the classical recordings of the decade
• The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov
• Osvaldo Golijov @ Boosey & Hawkes