A New Era Dawns for Upshaw : A pillar of nice in a not-so-nice business, Dawn Upshaw has quietly become a Metropolitan Opera star through her honest devotion to the music and her pure soprano--not the theatrics you might expect. How did someone so normal make it so big?

About two years ago, Dawn Upshaw suddenly became a celebrity. Already highly respected for singing the lighter Mozart roles, Schubert Lieder and the 20th-Century art song, as well as concert works and opera, the press was now comparing her to Callas and Madonna, and to the punk classical violinist, Nigel Kennedy. She even was called an unlikely pop star.

Yet nothing about Upshaw, the American soprano appearing this week with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, calls to mind Kennedy, Callas or Madonna. She is not unkempt, rebellious or, in any way, extravagant. She does not shock; she does not reinvent or flaunt herself. Onstage, she demonstrates little artifice or attitude.

Nothing about Upshaw’s manner suggests that she is a star. Yet the morning I met Upshaw at a cafe near Lincoln Center, her picture happened to be where opera singers (or living pop singers, for that matter) rarely find themselves--on the front page of the New York Times.

Admittedly, the picture was there to announce a review inside of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” which included the Metropolitan Opera debut of a much-hyped Welsh baritone, Bryn Terfel. It was with Terfel, the Figaro, that Upshaw, as Susanna, was pictured. But Upshaw is no small attraction herself at the Met these days (she’s just better known), and her ovations were equal to his.

Upshaw’s real fame, however, has been elsewhere achieved. Hers is the luminous soprano voice in the celebrated Nonesuch recording of Henryk Gorecki’s Third Symphony, the super-serious, super-slow Polish symphony that has had remarkable appeal to both the pop and classical markets, and which has been a spectacular bestseller for the past two years. And now, thanks again to Nonesuch, Upshaw (who had previously released two Grammy-winning collections of 20th-Century works) seems to be winning yet more new crossover adherents with “I Wish It So,” a music-theater disc of songs by Bernstein, Blitzstein, Sondheim and Weill, as well as an appearance on the latest Kronos Quartet recording, “Night Prayers,” of mystical music from Eastern Europe.

“It’s pretty weird, isn’t it, when you think about it?” Upshaw asks, and then bursts into a laugh, when she considers going from “I Feel Pretty” to the eerie “Lacrymosa” by Uzbekistani composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, on Kronos’ disc; or from Mozart at the Met to the ambrosial, folk-based Canteloube “Songs of the Auvernge” and the modernist “Flowers and Fables” by Witold Lutoslawski, works that she will sing this week with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “I, of course, consider myself to be extremely lucky that it’s so varied.”

She also says that it all feels perfectly normal. “It feels normal when I do ‘Figaro,’ which is one of the most perfectly brilliant pieces I know: it seems to have a life of its own. I’m just not conscious that now I’m going to sing classical music, or now I’m singing 19th- Century music. Maybe some people believe that I ought to be more conscious of the changes of style.”

Occasionally Upshaw is, in fact, criticized for being too normal. Opera singers--and sopranos, in particular--are expected to be somewhat temperamental. But it is also that lack of pretense, the honest devotion to the music being sung or, in opera, the character being portrayed, along with the sheer reliability of her technique and the purity of sound, that has made Upshaw seem such a breath of fresh air in a not always nice or idealistic business.

And, in person, Upshaw seems pretty much as she does on stage. When she arrives no more than two minutes late for the interview (she had already called ahead and warned that she might get delayed in traffic), she is all apologies. She appears genuinely bemused and disbelieving that her picture is on the front page of the New York Times. Her manner and dress are so unpretentious that, in jeans and a sweater, she could be any Upper West Sider, so she attracts no stares of recognition when we later walk over to the Met.

None of this is to suggest, however, that Upshaw--who at 34 seems to be entering into her vocal prime and a new interpretive confidence--lacks character or personality. Indeed, the key to Upshaw’s communicability seems to be the deep and essential way she internalizes what she sings, which then allows her a certain outer flexibility. And her commercial and artistic triumph in the Gorecki Third Symphony is, perhaps, a perfect, if curious, example of that.

Before Upshaw recorded the Gorecki three years ago, she was a singer well-known to vocal connoisseurs but hardly beyond. After having sung small roles at the Met since 1984, she got her big break in 1988, replacing an indisposed Kathleen Battle in Donizetti’s ‘L’Elisir d’Amore.’ She developed a reputation as an adroit Mozart singer and recorded Susanna for James Levine on Deutsche Grammophon but also worked with early music specialists, singing Pamina in Roger Norrington’s recording of “Die Zauberflote.” She was also a respected recitalist with the rare interest in contemporary American music, including that of former Los Angeles Philharmonic composer-in-residence John Harbison, whom she has championed.

Upshaw had proven that she could reach surprisingly diverse audiences when her Nonesuch recording of Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (which also included Harbison’s exotic “Mirabai Songs” and probably the best performance Anne Trulove’s aria, “No Word from Tom,” from Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” had ever gotten) proved both a bestseller and Grammy winner. The follow-up, “The Girl With Orange Lips” (with more obscure repertoire, including works by Ravel, Falla, Stravinsky, Earl Kim and Maurice Delage) did equally well in the stores and with the Grammy jury.

But hardly anyone would have thought of Upshaw in terms of Gorecki’s symphony, let alone real celebrity. The symphony had already been thrice recorded by Polish soprano Stefania Woytowicz, a very different sort of singer. “I, too, when I first got the piece, wasn’t showing very much imagination myself,” Upshaw says, recalling being approached by Nonesuch’s Robert Hurwitz to record the vocal parts in the symphony.

“My first reaction came from listening. I heard the big huge voice on the recording he sent me, those big long tones and the huge phrases, and I thought he’s got to be kidding, I can’t do this. But since I was very moved by the piece and by the text, I called Bob and said that I was not sure about it, and let me spend some more time with it.

“Then I looked at the music, and I thought, ‘You know, I don’t think it has to be that way. I think it could be successful done the way I need to do it.’ And once I had decided to look at it differently, I was convinced.”

It could even be argued that it was precisely because Upshaw approached the music differently that the symphony became the phenomenon it did, the best-selling serious work by a living composer in anyone’s memory, with a long life on the pop charts.

A symphony in three slow movements, with sung texts of sorrowful lamentations of a mother’s loss of child--from the 15th Century, from a folk source and, most disturbingly, from concentration camp graffiti--the score can seem woeful to an unbearable degree when sung by Woytowicz, as one loses the message in the sheer weeping. Upshaw, however, with her great emphasis on text, but without the overblown vocal gestures, allows one to listen through to the symphony’s message, creating a uniquely powerful experience.

Something similar happens in the equally unlikely seeming success of Upshaw’s new recording of songs from musical theater, which she also admits is something of a leap for her. “I probably notice more of a difference between the ‘I Wish It So’ repertory and the changes of style with the other things that I do, than between the Mozart and the other things that I do,” she says.

“But while the colloquial nature of these songs draws me a little further away, I’m still not conscious of singing differently. I’m conscious of using the language differently, and I’m conscious of singing lower. But that’s OK. I can’t stand any categorizing of singers that tries to keep you within a certain range.”

Some of the naturalness to her singing of musical theater is simply that of being an American who grew up in the Midwest--in Park Forest, Ill., near Chicago--in a family that enjoyed folk singing, and of her hearing the musical theater style of work all her life. “It’s true that I did go to college thinking that I was going to try to make it in music theater,” Upshaw further notes. “But I think that a lot of American singers of my generation probably grew up with this music. This is, at least, what I was hearing a lot more than Mozart or Schubert.”

But again, as in the Gorecki, much of the music on the album is not exactly familiar--an effort was made to include a few little-known gems, along with more familiar songs, as it was to emphasize composers who had similarly serious notions about music theater and had written both for music theater and opera. Moreover, many of the songs come from roles that Upshaw finds personally remote from her own experiences, so once more she had to find her own personal way into the music.

For instance, the Stephen Sondheim song, “Like It Was,” from “Merrily We Roll Along,” is the expression of a character whose experience, Upshaw notes, is far from her own. “It was hard for me to imagine being an alcoholic in my late ‘40s, looking back on a relationship unlike any relationship I’ve ever had. I’m asked to use my imagination like that all the time. But somehow with this Sondheim song I feel like I especially had to make it work for me.”

In this case that means singing a song full of bitter irony about having been really nice in an authentically nice manner, which turns the irony upside down upon itself, and, as in the Gorecki, seems all the more moving because of it.

An even more telling example, though, of just how effectively Upshaw can do this happened when she tried out this repertoire for the first time in a cabaret setting, at the Supper Club in Manhattan. She introduced one number by telling the audience that, as she had just given birth to her second child, the song had become her personal daily therapy. It was “I Feel Pretty,” from “West Side Story,” and Upshaw sang it as it surely had never been sung before, with a happy irony added to every phrase.

That also brings up another major aspect of Upshaw’s career, which is her family life. Anyone who has regularly observed her will remember recitals from a very pregnant Upshaw, four years ago, before her first child was born, although last spring she was able to disguise her pregnancy with a nun’s habit, when she appeared at the Met in a celebrated performance of Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites.”

Balancing her family--husband Michael Nott is a musicologist--and performances, especially in opera, is something that she has often commented upon. “It’s not easy,” she confesses. “The last thing I want to happen is for this business and performing to become my life, for everything to work around it, to be possessed by my thoughts about it.

“What I have realized over the years is that music and my performing is so tangled up in my life that the more I appreciate my relationships with people, the more I appreciate music, and the more extraordinary my relationship with music becomes. So having a family and having children just really helps keep my perspective of things. It makes it hard for me to travel; it’s hard for me to practice as much as I used to. So I need to do a little bit less and maybe travel less and balance all of that out.”

But at the moment Upshaw seems to be managing a remarkable supermom act, impressively in control of her life, which may be what gave her Susanna a special sense of purpose. Still, she has an extraordinary schedule--extraordinary not just in quantity but in variety--of performances in concert and opera and of recordings. She will be recording the Lutoslawski with Esa-Pekka Salonen, directly following the Los Angeles performances, for Sony (her recent Sony CD of Debussy’s “La Damoiselle Elue” with Salonen and the Philharmonic has been much praised), and that will be followed by a Debussy song disc, accompanied by Levine.

This winter and spring she will be offering a a number of new and recent American works by Harbison, Jacob Druckman and Robert Beaser. She will sing her first Sophie in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Houston Opera. In the summer she records roles ranging from Maria in “West Side Story,” with Leonard Slatkin and the Washington Opera, to Anne Trulove in “The Rake’s Progress” with Kent Nagano and the Lyon Opera (with whom she has just released an Erato disc of the Canteloube songs she is singing at the Music Center).

After that, she says that she will find herself in Europe for half of next year in opera productions. But that isn’t something she plans to repeat again in the near future, since her daughter will be entering school, and she doesn’t want to leave her for long periods. Still, no one seems particularly worried. If Upshaw has proven anything in her career, it is that she is versatile and that those things that mean the most to her find their way into her music in ways that makes them mean something to everyone else as well.

* Dawn Upshaw performs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, on Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. $6-$50. (213) 365-3500.