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Soprano Dawn Upshaw and Peter Sellars

Michael Zwiebach on June 14, 2011
Dawn Upshaw

There are lots of big music events going on in the Bay Area this week, but let's not forget about Ojai North!, where the adventurous Cal Performances imports the best of the famed Ojai Festival to the UC Berkeley campus.

On Thursday (and now, Saturday, thanks to high ticket demand), soprano Dawn Upshaw performs Winds of Destiny, her collaborative work with director Peter Sellars. It's a meditation on war, loss, and homecoming set to George Crumb's song cycle of the same name.

Upshaw is a riveting performer and her last collaboration with Sellars (Kafka Fragments, which also visited Cal Performances) earned a place on a lot of critics' top-ten lists. In spite of everything that's going on, a lot of music and theater lovers are making time for this show.