It’s been exactly a week since I got back from the NATS convention in Nashville, and with all that has happened since then, it feels like it was months if not years ago! First of all, it was a nice time and an interesting convention, but it felt strange to be there without Kathy; having her there would have made it still more fun. On the other hand, being there on my own allowed me to really focus on the convention and on all there was to experience and learn.
Conventions like this are always an interesting mix of the fascinating and the pointless – and fortunately the former usually outweighs the latter by quite a margin. For me, the high point of this convention was the involvement of a wonderful American soprano by the name of Dawn Upshaw. You can be forgiven for not necessarily knowing her name, for she is not a superstar in the league of Domingo or Pavarotti or Leontyne Price or Joan Sutherland. On the other hand, she is certainly one of the shining stars of her generation. She has sung leading roles with the Metropolitan Opera (and been featured in a couple of their telecasts) and has lots of superb recordings to her credit, many of which reflect her wonderful work in concerts and recitals. She is an incredibly intelligent and sensitive musician and that shines through in everything she does.
She is also a cancer survivor, which somehow adds an additional layer of poignancy and importance to her singing. One has a sense that she – and we – are especially fortunate to have that particular moment of music together. I know that when she walked out on the stage of the original Grand Ol Opry for her Saturday night recital, the torrent of applause which greeted her was a combination of enthusiasm for her past accomplishments, affection for her as a human being, and gratitude that (at least for now) she has beaten back the challenge of cancer and able to perform again. By the way, she was born in Nashville, so this performance was a heartwarming homecoming as well.
Anyway, I loved her recital and felt especially privileged to be seated eight rows from the front, right in the middle of the audience – absolutely perfect seats. I was mightily tempted to take lots of pictures, but the Grand Ol Opry ushers, even though they appeared to be in their 70s and 80s, looked formidable and I didn’t want to risk being caught and forcibly removed from the premises. So one blurry photo I surreptitiously shot during the final applause was all I dared do.
But no matter- I could snap pictures to my heart’s content at the master class which she did the following afternoon. Three young singers performed for her, and she worked with each one of them with such discernment and grace. In each case, she asked them if there was anything in particular that was a concern for them before launching into whatever it was that she felt needed to be said. And she had just the right amount of hesitancy to be SO endearing, versus some master teachers who waltz in like they’re Caruso and Callas rolled up into one, ready to bestow their unparalleled brilliance and wisdom on all who are assembled there. Dawn Upshaw proceeded much more cautiously than that – and right off the bat, she said that she would say very little about vocal technique because she had no way of knowing where each singer was in their own vocal development. . . what issues they had been trying to deal with, what problems had been recently conquered, etc. She was more comfortable limiting herself to matters of interpretation and expression and on those matters she had all kinds of wonderful and helpful things to say. Again and again, she would have the singer simplify their approach and try to do much less showing of feeling or expression and simply being whatever was called for. . . being sad or being glad rather than conveying or displaying those emotions. And she had terrific things to say about underlining important words – and of how so often we are much more attentive to final consonants than we are to initial and interior consonants. (She is so right about that.) Again and again, I thought she hit it right on the head with each singer, not trying to fix problems as much as giving them new things to think about, new possibilities to consider.
Something else I liked was that she weighed her words carefully – – – there were LOTS of thoughtful pauses, which really gave the impression that this master class mattered to her a lot and that she was in no way shape or form phoning it in. She wanted to serve each singers to the best of her abilities, right down to choosing each words to express what she wanted to say in the way which would best connect with the singer at hand. It was the antithesis of so many master classes where the master teacher comes off as a pompous know-it-all. Dawn was just the opposite of that, and came off all the more masterful because of it.
What is truly amazing to me is that the first person I went up to afterwards was disappointed in the master class we had just heard. . . as was the next person and the next and the next and the next. (After five people, I stopped asking people what they thought of it.) I was dumbfounded. The complaint was that she hadn’t done enough – that she could have been more aggressive – that she could have used the time better, etc. I think these colleagues with whom I spoke are used to the other kind of master class in which the teacher rolls out their big bag of quick tricks, quick fixes. . . while this was far more thoughtful and thorough. I wanted to say to them, “You Fool! You just witnessed the finest master class of your life and you don’t even know it! “
But what I said was “Hmmm.”