Dawn Upshaw has been named Music Director for the 2011 Ojai Music Festival. Next year's gathering, June 9–12, 2011, will mark the soprano's fourth appearance at the festival. Among those already signed on to participate are Richard Tognetti, Maria Schneider, and Peter Sellars. Upshaw makes her debut with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra later this month, performing works written for her by Osvaldo Golijov.

The San Francisco Symphony has announced its 2010-11 season, which will feature the return of composer John Adams as a featured composer. Adams will conduct the SFS in multiple performances of El Niño starring Dawn Upshaw this December. Also part of the focus on Adams: an SFS performance of Harmonielehre, led by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, and an all-Adams chamber music concert featuring members of the orchestra.

Dawn Upshaw has renewed her artistic partnership with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra for the next three seasons. She began her partnership with the orchestra in the 2007-08 season and will now continue through the 2012-13 season. In the 2010-11 season, Upshaw joins the SPCO for a world premiere by Gabriela Frank plus works by Berio and Mahler. Also next season, Brad Mehldau will join the SPCO for the world premiere of his Highway Rider.

Dawn Upshaw joins the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, led by David Zinman, at Edinburgh's Usher Hall tonight as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. In 1991, Upshaw and Zinman came together for the the now-famous Nonesuch recording of Górecki's Third Symphony. Scotland's Herald takes a look at this "global smash" as part of a closer look at the career of the singer who helped make it such a success.

Dawn Upshaw and pianist Gilbert Kalish performed at Boston's Jordan Hall on Sunday afternoon, in what the Boston Globe calls a "memorable" recital. "She is, indisputably, a great singer, with a voice that radiates power and unforced warmth," says the Globe. "But her secret weapon is a casual, unpretentious demeanor that lessens the distance between stage and audience. Listeners in her presence experience music not as the inaccessible product of a holy art but as a thing of open, approachable beauty." Later this month, Nonesuch will reissue, as MP3 albums, exclusively in the Nonesuch Store, five recordings of the Haydn piano sonatas Kalish made for the label between 1975 and 1980.

Dawn Upshaw was in Boston yesterday for a performance with pianist Gilbert Kalish at Jordan Hall of works by a wide variety of composers, from Ravel to Golijov. Upshaw, with her ability to transform whatever she chooses to perform "into a soul-rattling artistic experience," is the subject of an extensive feature profile in the Boston Globe that describes her as "one of the most significant and dramatically moving singers before the public today ... Upshaw's rare gift as a performer is an ability to inhabit a work on the most profound levels, to live the music on stage rather than sing it at you."

Dawn Upshaw begins a two-week tour of Australia with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Canberra Friday night. On the tour program are works by Mozart, Strauss, Bartók, and Upshaw's frequent collaborator, Osvaldo Golijov. The Australian lauds her "near-rapturous devotion to art" and her support of new music, in particular. "Upshaw's commitment to music goes beyond her choice of repertoire, however. It's in the texture and expressive shading of her voice, the aural evidence of her intelligent probing of text and music."

John Adams has been named the first-ever Creative Chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, beginning next season, the orchestra's first with Music Director Designate Gustavo Dudamel. "John’s work, vision and big knowledge of all music, especially new music, is so deep," says Dudamel. The 2009/10 season gets under way with an Opening Night Gala concert, pairing Mahler's First Symphony with the world premiere of Adams's City Noir. As Creative Chair, the composer curates the West Coast: Left Coast festival, beginning late November, with a residency by Kronos Quartet; a new work by Thomas Newman; a jazz trio with Joshua Redman; and concerts led by Adams.

Dawn Upshaw performs in the West Coast premiere of Kaija Saariaho's Passion de Simone—the Finnish composer's oratorio inspired by French philosopher Simone Weil—tonight at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his last season as the orchestra's music director. Peter Sellars directs. An encore performance takes place this Saturday night. Upshaw gave the US premiere of the piece during last summer's Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center.

Following her performance in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall this past Sunday, Dawn Upshaw is preparing for two nights at Lincoln Center's Gerald Lynch Theater, in a production of Kurtág's Kafka Fragments. She first brought the piece to Zankel Hall in 2005, under the direction of Peter Sellars and with violinist Geoff Nuttall, who also return for the current iteration. The New York Times talks to the soprano about the piece and her other current projects; she says: "I feel I’m doing the world—or my audience—the most good by bringing things to them that I either feel have an important message or bring perspective or beauty to their lives, and do it as honestly as I can."

Dawn Upshaw's performance last month with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony for the Opening Night Gala of Carnegie Hall's 118th season receives its broadcast premiere tonight on PBS's Great Performances. When the all-Bernstein program had its San Francisco debut, the San Francisco Chronicle hailed Dawn's performance as "the high point" of the evening, citing her "fizzy, funny and wonderfully evocative rendition" of the aria "What a Movie" from the opera Trouble in Tahiti.

Audra McDonald and Dawn Upshaw will take the stage at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles tonight for the Opening Night Gala of the Los Angeles Philarmonic's 2008–09 season, the orchestra's last with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at its helm. Audra will sing Sondheim's "There Won't Be Trumpets" and Jule Styne / Sammy Cahn's "10,432 Sheep"; Dawn will perform songs from John Adams's Nixon in China and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. The eclectic program also includes selections from Stravinsky's The Firebird.