Dawn Upshaw: The Diva Next Door

It was a storybook debut. In 1988 the Metropolitan Opera needed a last-minute replacement for Kathleen Battle in L'Elisir d'Amore. It turned to an apprentice in its young-artists program named Dawn Upshaw. The audience cheered, and the critics raved about Upshaw's charm and freshness; she seemed set for a predictable rise in the soubrette roles of grand opera. But Upshaw had ideas of her own. A few years earlier, one of her voice teachers, Jan DeGaetani, had told her to "seek your own path." Upshaw took that advice. From Mozart to Stravinsky to show tunes, she sings a far wider range of music than is typical for an international star, yet at 34 she has risen faster and further than any other American singer of her generation.

From the moment of the Met triumph, Upshaw made it clear she intended to be a singer first, a diva second. She had performed in only a few operas and had barely established a recital career when she produced two astonishing albums. On one, released in 1989, she sang Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and compositions by Menotti, Stravinsky and John Harbison. The other, which came out two years later, is called The Girl with Orange Lips and is a collection of highly unusual contemporary pieces. Both won Grammys. Her next album, the Symphony No. 3 by Polish composer Henryk Gorecki, on which she was the soloist, became the most unexpected classical crossover hit of all time, landing on the British pop charts in 1993. Now Upshaw has another unlikely triumph on her hands: a new album called I Wish It So, which consists of mostly unfamiliar theater songs by Kurt Weill, Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

Few opera singers have ever seemed so convincing -- and comfortable -- in the Broadway idiom. Upshaw begins with four songs of yearning for love: the album's title number, taken from Blitzstein's 1959 Juno; There Won't Be Trumpets, a song dropped from Sondheim's short-lived 1964 show Anyone Can Whistle; What More Do I Need?, from an unproduced Sondheim musical of 1954, ! Saturday Night; and That's Him, from Weill and Ogden Nash's 1943 One Touch of Venus. Accompanied alternately by small ensembles and an orchestra, Upshaw stakes her claim as theater music's most luminous ingenue since Barbara Cook -- vulnerable yet resolute, urgently soaring yet as down-to-earth as the girl next door.

In the remainder of the album, Upshaw reveals that she is equally at home in less sentimental moods, skillfully handling, for example, the cynical extravagance of Bernstein's Glitter and Be Gay (from Candide). Only in I Feel Pretty, from West Side Story, does she seem outside the song, pushing its innocence too hard. Otherwise, she conveys what the best singers have always strived for: the sense that a song springs directly from mysterious promptings within her.