We should look first to Barber's masterpiece, to that lazy summer of 1915 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Dawn Upshaw's moving account for Elektra-Nonesuch won so many hearts by virtue of its freshness, innocence and honesty. David Zinman was her accomplice: together they kept the swing on the back-porch ''rocking gently''; theirs was very much the child's view of an adult world. Sylvia McNair another—some would say the other—leading light among American lyric sopranos, is a little more grown up, a little more aware and sophisticated in her approach to the piece. She and Yoel Levi slip into a dreamier and lazier tempo: something of the wide-eyed innocence is immediately lost. McNair is true and pure, the words weighed and measured, almost too precisely and evenly. I like the way she colours the ''iron moan'', the ''cracking and cursing'' of the ''streetcar'' passage, but a little more pace would have lifted the contrast into even sharper relief. Make no mistake, though, the ecstatic line soars: ''Now is the night one blue dew'' is gorgeous, the top of the voice absolutely pristine, and I love the way she embraces the portamento as ''sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her''. There are lovely orchestral details too: ''the exalted noise of the locusts'' is hauntingly echoed in the glaze of high-pitched strings. I suppose what I miss most of all, though, is Upshaw's inner light, the extraordinary intensity she brings to climactic phrases like ''one is my mother who is good to me'' or ''who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth''. In a nutshell, McNair doesn't pull those particular heart-strings for me.
But you will be wanting to weigh the rest of this all-Barber package against Upshaw's compelling mix of Stravinsky, Menotti and Harbison. I'm not sure that I would opt for Levi's undeniably solid accounts of the first two Essays over Slatkin (EMI) or Jarvi (Chandos) but Telarc's top-notch engineering gives them a more than respectable headstart, the heavy-hearted lamentation of the First Essay impressively rooted here in deep-set, searching bass lines. The Second, too, displays a handsome bloom with thrilling bass extension. A very alert fugal gigue spills over in a splendidly defiant drum and tam-tam emblazoned peroration. With sound like this you can hardly fail to get a result. Rather more revealing of Levi is his generous, deftly-turned account of Barber's student opus, The School for Scandal Overture and a long-breathed Adagio for strings which brings full, even legato to a fine head. Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance graduates from sultry melismatic orientalisms (fine woodwind principals) to barbarous aggression with all due inexorability. The steely clash and flash of the upper parts (xylophone violins and piccolo) is particularly well-caught in the dance, though here was one occasion where a less discreet spotlight might have been cast on the obsessive ostinato of the piano.'