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Dawn 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.

Her acclaimed performances on the opera stage comprise the great Mozart roles (Pamina, Ilia, Susanna, Despina) as well as modern works by Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Messiaen. From Salzburg, Paris and Glyndebourne to the Metropolitan Opera, where she began her career in 1984 and has since made nearly 300 appearances, Dawn Upshaw has also championed numerous new works created for her including The Great Gatsby by John Harbison; the Grawemeyer Award-winning opera, L’Amour de Loin and oratorio La Passion de Simone by Kaija Saariaho; John Adams’s Nativity oratorio El Niño; and Osvaldo Golijov’s chamber opera Ainadamar and song cycle Ayre.

Ms. Upshaw’s 2010-11 season opens with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in performances of Golijov and Canteloube at the Tanglewood Music Festival. She tours Europe in Peter Sellars’ acclaimed production of Kurtag’s “Kafka Fragments”, and appears in recital at London’s Barbican Centre (with Gerald Finley). She reprises her celebrated role in John Adams’s El Niño with the San Francisco Symphony, and begins a second three-year term as Artistic Partner with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, with whom she also appears at Carnegie Hall as part of the “Spring For Music” series. She sings world premieres of four new works written for her, including a chamber piece by Donnacha Dennehy and the Crash Ensemble in Dublin, slated for release on Nonesuch Records; a co-commission with the Terezin Foundation and the Prague Spring Festival by Pablo Ortiz; a vocal and chamber orchestra commission from Gabriela Frank for the SPCO; and a jazz-inflected score by Maria Schneider for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, with first performances at the 2011 Ojai Festival where Ms. Upshaw is the Music Director. There she curates and performs a series of concerts with the ACO, as well as a new production by Peter Sellars that features Ms. Upshaw in selections from George Crumb’s “American Songbooks”. Co-produced by Cal Performances, this work is among the highlights of U.C. Berkeley’s Celebrity Series offering, “Ojai North”.

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