Upshaw’s Adventures in Repertory

Soprano Dawn Upshaw said she was indisposed, but you were hard pressed to know it.

Speaking from the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Sunday, as she made her Los Angeles Philharmonic Celebrity Recital debut, Upshaw said she was suffering from an allergy. She announced she would be dropping some planned repertory, adding other works and slightly rearranging the program.

Dropped were Griffes’ “Three Poems of Fiona MacLeod” and two of five Rachmaninoff songs. Added were three Schubert lieder: “Im Fruhling,” “Du liebst mich nicht” and “Der Musensohn.” Not exactly chopped liver.

It remained a difficult and challenging program, for both sides of the footlights. Some people, no doubt expecting a recital of traditional tunes, departed after hearing Ives, Harbison and some very unromantic Strauss in the first half. The beloved, hummable songs of Schubert didn’t come until Part 2. But most of the audience stayed and cheered.

The famed Upshaw soprano betrayed only the slightest burr on the rarest of occasions. Otherwise, the aching clarity, fine focus and bright timbre remained intact.

Her voice is lean, lyric and light, and she knows how to shift and mix vocal colors without muddying them. She prefers understatement to high drama. But that doesn’t mean she fails to invest the texts with character. She knows how to put over a song; how to sell it, in the best sense. And so it was for seven Ives songs, all distinct character vignettes, ranging from the early and almost traditional “Songs My Mother Taught Me” to the moody late “Evening.”

So, too, with Strauss’ “Ophelia’s Three Songs”, which are also craggy character vignettes, rather than the sweeping melodies the composer is famous for. Ophelia, after all, sings them after she’s lost her mind.

Strauss’ fragmentation of his Romantic style mirrors Shakespeare’s fractured text and sounds surprisingly modern. Indeed, Strauss in some ways sounded more contemporary than Ives, whose character studies seemed to prefigure, in Upshaw’s performance, much of musical theater of today.

Harbison’s “Mirabai Songs” are problematic. Mirabai is important in Indian culture not so much for herself as for her ecstatic devotion to Lord Krishna. In a typical Western reversal, Harbison shifts the focus to her, creating pictures of the singer, not the object of her song. His style, a mix of popular and accessible art music, rarely approaches the state of ecstasy that Indian dancers routinely achieve. Upshaw sang the pieces with commitment.

For signature Upshaw radiant tone, like a narrow beam of light that begins to warm intensely without losing its laser focus, the best opportunities came in the Rachmaninoff songs (“The Muse,” “Daisies” and “The Pied Piper”), though the Schubert lieder also were accomplished.

Throughout the recital, pianist Gilbert Kalish provided deeply sensitive accompaniment. It is astonishing that an artist of his stature only now was making his Music Center debut.