Good Traveling Companions

Soprano Dawn Upshaw and the Kronos Quartet appeared very comfortable together in their joint appearance Tuesday night at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, and indeed they said in a post-concert discussion with the audience that they were old friends. But it is not musically obvious why that should be.

They share an imaginative record company, Nonesuch, but not very much music. A good deal of Upshaw’s time is spent with standard operatic and song repertory; her crossover work (Gershwin, Sondheim, Vernon Duke, Bernstein) tends toward the standards; her modern music tastes are often well in the mainstream (such as John Harbison). The Kronos is locked in the 20th and 21st centuries, and it has a penchant for world music, rock and jazz. Upshaw and Kronos do have a few enthusiasms in common, however, most notably for the music of Henryk Gorecki and George Crumb.

But Kronos is a quartet of gatherers; it has made a career of collecting as much of the world’s music as it possibly can. And Upshaw is the gamest, most willing-to-try-anything of star singers. Their enterprisingly multicultural project, titled “Tonight Is the Night” (after an Indian song from a Bombay musical film), has the quality of the Kronos persuading Upshaw to get her visas and shots and go along with the quartet on one of its meandering journeys.

Fearlessly they trek, seeming to be guided by nothing but the spirit of adventure, learning along the way the language and customs of Argentina, Egypt, Portugal, Nashville and Andalusia. When they step back into time, they imagine Mayan culture and America 150 years ago. But what makes their tour so immensely enjoyable is that they always travel as Kronos and Upshaw, as themselves, taking in the world through their own likable personalities, ever the wide-eyed Americans. It is perhaps the musical equivalent of those amusing travelogues by Michael Palin, where we better understand the world by seeing it reflected in someone else.

It is also easier to understand a foreign language when heard spoken with your own accent. Upshaw actually has a way with languages, but the well-scrubbed tone of her soprano, her pitch so pure and her manner so direct, is absolutely American. Her voice is immediately recognizable. She bent pitches and captured all the seductive vocal squiggles in the Hindi song “Aaj Ki Raat” (Tonight Is the Night). She was Miss Heartbreak singing Patsy Cline’s version of “The Wayward Wind”; she was a credible flamenco singer in “Quisiera Yo Renegar”(I’d Like to Forsake); she assumed the aura of a moody fado chanteuse in “Coimbra”; she seemed to know what she was doing with an Arab number from the repertory of popular Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum; she was, of course, properly homespun singing Stephen Foster.

But Upshaw is not a mimic and neither is the Kronos. Osvaldo Golijov, who arranged “Aaj Ki Raat” (which also included sitar player Zakir Hussain, prerecorded) and “Quisiera Yo Renegar,” added a whole new sense of imaginary composition. In the other songs, more conventionally arranged by Stephen Prutsman, there was more the feeling of showing off musical postcards. Golijov also wrote a gorgeous new song for Upshaw, “Lua Decolorida” (Moon, Colorless), a quivering melody decorated with brilliantly subdued string quartet effects.

New as well is a larger piece, by young Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, in five movements, inspired by Mayan cosmology and with Mayan texts. Here, scholarship and archeology got in the way. Instead of gathering and showing the world, Ortiz tried to re-create a lost culture through very modern means, exploiting many of the formulaic sound effects that the Kronos excels in and asking the group to play small cymbals as well. At the end, the string players slowly walk off stage, leaving the soprano alone singing softly.

The program opened with a few selections by the quartet from its sensational new album, “Kronos Caravan,” including the marvelous Golijov arrangements of Indian, Portuguese and Hungarian songs, as well as his version of Stravinsky’s “Circus Polka” and the Astor Piazzolla’s quartet, “Four, for Tango,” written for Kronos. The encore was Upshaw singing “Fever,” not Peggy Lee hot, but rather with a more sophisticated variety of delicate spices.

The Kronos and Upshaw, strings and singer subtly amplified, blend almost effortlessly. And the quartet’s new cellist, Jennifer Culp, who has been with violinist David Harrington and John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt since 1999, sounds at home, if there is such a thing as home with this gadding-about quartet. The Upshaw/Kronos project, which is touring four American and two European cities (and in the discussion stages for a recording) was commissioned in part by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, and that is an example of how this presenter is becoming an increasingly important presence on the national music scene.