Kurtag Kafka Fragments: Dawn Upshaw at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles

Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times writes:

Sunday night, President-elect Barack Obama, appearing with his wife, Michelle, on “60 Minutes,” spoke of household chores. He doesn't, he admitted, volunteer to wash dishes, but he washes them. And when he does, he said, he tries to use that as therapeutic practice, to find something soothing in the discipline.
Almost as if on cue, Tuesday night Dawn Upshaw got out the Dawn. The soprano put on rubber yellow gloves with satisfying pizzicato snaps and got down to the business of cleansing her soul. Upshaw washed dishes on the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage. And in doing so, and quite a bit more that took her to the brink of sanity and back more than once, she offered one of the great musical and dramatic performances of our time.

Read more at the LA Times

Harvey Steiman at Seen and Heard writes:

"The music for voice is not so jagged as the violin’s. It moves easily, though not always in the direction you might expect. Upshaw sings it with her usual tonal purity and care for the text, investing every phrase with her own emotional content. After all the angst, the emotional release of the final nocturne, “The moonlit night dazzled us,” was heartbreakingly beautiful to hear."

Read more at Seen and Heard