UPSHAW, TRIO WOW AUDIENCE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 8, 1992                   TAG: 9201080282
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
UPSHAW, TRIO WOW AUDIENCE
Dawn Upshaw had 'em in the palm of her hand Tuesday night at Greene Memorial United Methodist Church in Roanoke.
The Grammy Award-winning Metropolitan Opera star, whose career has skyrocketed in the past two years, appeared with the Kandinsky Trio in the Greene Memorial fine arts series. Judging from their enthusiastic response, not a few audience members in the packed house left wishing there was more repertoire for piano trio and soprano.
Upshaw performed a specially commissioned transcription of four of the six Op. 38 songs by Sergei Rachmaninov and crowned the evening with a powerful rendition of Dmitri Shostakovich's "Seven Romances on Verses by Alexander Blok," Op. 127.
As series organizer Richard Cummins pointed out, Upshaw's appearance as the third Met star to sing at Greene Memorial had some coincidences. The first was the legendary American soprano Eleanor Steber, who sang at the church in 1976 and 1978. It was Steber who four decades ago commissioned Samuel Barber's haunting "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" and who made what many connoisseurs regard as its definitive recording. And it was that same piece by Barber which headlined Dawn Upshaw's Grammy Award compact disc last year.
The Kandinsky Trio had the first half of the concert to themselves. They began with Beethoven's famous "Ghost" trio, his Trio in D Major, Op. 70, No. 1. The work gets its name from the fact that some of the second-movement material comes from sketches Beethoven prepared for the witches' scene in an unfinished opera based on "Macbeth." The middle movement, marked "Largo assai ed espressivo," is the emotional core of the work, but the trio gave the audience a yearning melancholy, not a scary ghost.
Next was a work that has come to be identified with the Roanoke College-based group, the rarely heard "Circulo" of Joaquin Turina. Subtitled "Fantasia," the work is an attractive melding of French Impressionism and the Spanish nationalistic style, and it got a lovely, meditative treatment from these players, who obviously enjoy the piece.
Works for soprano and piano trio don't exactly grow on trees in the world of classical music. That's why the trio commissioned transcriptions of four songs by Rachmaninov from the composer's Op. 38 set. Particularly fine was the arch humor of "The Pied Piper" and the autumnal ripeness of "Dreams." Upshaw's lovely lyric soprano - light, childlike, innocent, and sweet are adjectives that come to mind - is one of the most immediately identifiable instruments to emerge in years on the American voice scene.
The concert concluded with the darkly brooding settings of the Blok poems, which Shostakovich wrote expressly for soprano and trio. Upshaw brought out every nuance of these weirdly prophetic songs, at times with a frightening intensity. The devastatingly bleak finish of the final song, "Music," was especially memorable.
The Greene Memorial crowd wouldn't let Upshaw escape without an encore, which turned out to be a reprise of "The Pied Piper." Seth Williamson produces news features and a classical music program on public radio station WVTF (89.1 FM) in Roanoke.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB