Dawn Upshaw is the sort of megastar soprano you might expect to hear at mega-prices in a celebrity series at the National Concert Hall.
But that’s not where she’s going to be next Saturday night. Upshaw may have graced the great stages of the world, but she’s also one of those singers who takes contemporary music seriously. After all, it was her lustrous tone which helped Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, become a bestseller back in the 1990s. What brings her to Dublin is a collaboration with the Crash Ensemble, a contemporary music ensemble that like being compared to rock bands, for the premiere of Donnacha Dennehy’s Yeats setting That the Night Come. Upshaw and Crash then take the work into the recording studio for, who else, the Nonesuch label that brought out Upshaw’s Górecki all those years ago. Also in the October 2nd concert at the Great Hall, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin 8, are works by Osvaldo Golijov and John Zorn, and Dennehy’s Grá agus Bás, which was written for, and will be performed by, sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird. See www.tickets.ie.
