Upshaw's coloratura has justly earned her a reputation as an angelic singer (figuratively in Handel and literally as the Angel in Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi). But this particular performance involved her doing a lot more than angelic coloratura; I wish I could remember verbatim Golijov's comment about what he had in mind for the piece -- it was something along the lines of "I got really sick of writing Dawn Upshawy kinds of music for Dawn Upshaw so I decided not to this time." Has anyone ever heard Dawn Upshaw not sing like Dawn Upshaw? That's kind of what we got on Tuesday. Dawn Upshaw sang 1. mic'ed (and with variable mic levels, so that you never knew just how loud she was going to sound) and 2. in chest voice. The piece rocked out in certain places (at which points, parts of the ensemble would stand up like a big, jazzy Argentinian klezmer band and rock out with her, a nice touch of staging) and the chest voice kinda worked. Kinda. But ultimately, if you want a singer who can sing loud and chesty, you wanna write for a singer who doesn't need to protect her voice. Dawn sounded great. But somebody with a little more Arethra would've brought the house down.
I promised to say something about Michael Ward-Bergeman, who plays something called the hyper-accordion. It's as cool as it sounds. (Michael is also the only person I know who's ever been referred to as an accordiopimp.) Check him out here.
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