Tonight, after you’ve put away the snow shovel, popped some Advil, and finished slathering on the Bengay, consider tuning in for a couple of contemporary song cycles performed by Dawn Upshaw.
Upshaw will be my guest this week on “The Lost Chord.” She will talk about her working relationship with composer Osvaldo Golijov, whose “Three Songs” she will sing on an upcoming concert of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. We’ll also hear her astonishing recording of Golijov’s “Ayre,” a hypnotic synthesis of folk, pop and classical-inflected music on texts from Arabic, Hebrew, Sardinian and Sephardic sources.
Then she’ll melt our hearts by applying her distinctive timbre to selections from Maria Schneider’s “Winter Morning Walks.” Schneider is best known as a jazz artist, but, as is evident from her album “The Thompson Fields,” she possesses an extraordinarily ambitious compositional sense.
“Winter Morning Walks” was the recipient of three Grammy Awards in 2014, in the categories of Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Best Vocal Performance (for Dawn Upshaw), and Best Engineered Album, Classical. It was Upshaw’s fifth Grammy.
And lest you forget, Upshaw’s was the voice heard in the very moving recording of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, issued by Nonesuch Records in 1992, which sold over a million copies and became one of the best-selling classical music albums of all time.
Upshaw will appear at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium on January 31 at 4 p.m. Also on the program, PSO music director Rossen Milanov will conduct works by Mozart, Kodály, and Jing Jing Luo, the orchestra’s current composer-in-residence. For more information, visit princetonsymphony.org.
I hope you’ll join me for “The Knack of Dawn” – new music performed by Dawn Upshaw – this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.