Mañanita De San Juan

Dawn Upshaw throws herself at the text she’s been given here with such force, you’ll be forgiven if for the first minute of Golijov’s Ayre you become disoriented—I found myself wondering if I was listening to a Roma woman captured on tape by an enterprising ethnomusicologist. But then the klezmer line weaves its way into the track and the piercing power of Upshaw’s upper range enters the picture, and it’s quite obvious that no, this is not some gypsy camp fantasy but Golijov at work once again weaving geographies to great artistic effect. The music at the base of this work is not the composer’s, but rather a collection of traditional material arranged and assembled into this song cycle, designed to compliment Berio’s Folk Songs, with which it shares space on the disc.

—MS