Dawn Upshaw and Donnacha Dennehy are in the midst of their seven-day workshop at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute in New York. The Professional Training Workshop, presented in partnership with The Bard College Conservatory of Music, began on Monday and will continue through the weekend, with the duo mentoring four composers and ten singers on the collaboration between composer and performer in creating new vocal music. The participants will preview their new works for voice and ensemble in a Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Queens this Saturday and premiere them in Zankel Hall on Sunday. The ensemble will be conducted by Alarm Will Sound's artistic director, Alan Pierson. For more information, visit carnegiehall.org or nonesuch.com/on-tour.

The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has Dennehy's forthcoming Nonesuch debut album, Grá agus Bás, in current rotation on his playlist, as noted on his blog, The Rest Is Noise. The album is due out May 3 and includes the title piece, as well as the composer’s song cycle That the Night Come, on which Upshaw is featured. The album is currently available to pre-order in the Nonesuch Store.

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Just prior to this week's workshop, Upshaw joined the National Symphony Orchestra, led by Christoph Eschenbach, in performances of Osvaldo Golijov's She Was Here and Mahler's Symphony No. 4 at The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The Baltimore Sun describes the performance as "heavenly." "Upshaw has long been one of the most incisive vocal artists on the scene," writes the Sun's Tim Smith, "and she demonstrated great eloquence here, using her burnished low register to especially keen effect." Read the review at baltimoresun.com.

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Upshaw made her own Nonesuch debut back in 1989 on a recording of Samuel Barber's 1948 masterpiece Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with the Orchestra of St. Luke's led by David Zinman. Gramophone recently revisited its earlier look at the best recordings of the piece and declares this to be the definitive one.

"Let's not beat around the bush," writes Gramophone's Andrew Farach-Colton, "if you want just one recording of Knoxville, it should be Upshaw's. In no other version is the intimacy of Barber's music so poignantly conveyed. Upshaw manages to sing the piece beautifully while articulating the text with absolute clarity. Zinman's fastidiously attentive conducting contributes strongly to the performance's success."

The album earned Upshaw her first Grammy Award, for Best Classical Vocal Soloist Performance.

Read the Gramophone article at gramophone.co.uk. To download a copy of the digital album as high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s, head to the Nonesuch Store now.