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Music Review
Richard Tucker Night Is Opera's All-Star Game
Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times
The soprano Diana Damrau after singing Bernstein's "Glitter and Be Gay" from "Candide."

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By ANNE MIDGETTE
Published: November 6, 2007
Big opera galas have much in common with sporting events: Fans gather to watch, and compare, feats of physical prowess. This parallel is always particularly clear at the annual gala of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation, held this year on Sunday at Avery Fisher Hall.

Every year — perhaps inevitably in an event involving so many singers — illness plays havoc with the rotation. By the end of Sunday's performance, the changes had left the printed program as filled with excised names and emendations as a manager's lineup card in the ninth inning. (For starters: Dolora Zajick, Susan Graham and Bryn Terfel were out; Luciana D'Intino, Joyce DiDonato and Andrzej Dobber were in.)

One difference between sports and opera is that while live broadcast slows down a sporting event (all those commercials), it seems to speed up opera. Sunday's performance was simulcast to nine university campuses and moved along at a notable clip, with singers entering stage right as their predecessors were still exiting stage left, while Asher Fisch, the conductor, kept members of the Met Orchestra playing with animation.

There were two clean-up hitters on the program, Ms. DiDonato and Diana Damrau. It is hard to say who was better. Ms. DiDonato, having flown in from Switzerland for the day to pinch hit, evidently decided to make her trip worth everyone's while, especially with an "Una voce poco fa" from Rossini's "Barbiere di Siviglia" that was among the most spectacular vocal feats this listener has ever heard, thrown off with ease, a sense of fun and pinpoint control.

Ms. Damrau offered a "Glitter and Be Gay" from Bernstein's "Candide" that was over the top in every sense, including the top of the staff, above which she floated with starry radiance. You might have called it too campy (and a little hard to understand) had she not had the vocal goods to back up her active wooing of the adoring audience.

Ms. Damrau even overshadowed Renée Fleming, who said something rueful about having such a hard act to follow before offering an attractive if rather unidiomatic "Poveri fiori" from "Adriana Lecouvreur." It was in a duet from "Così Fan Tutte," with Ms. DiDonato, that Ms. Fleming truly shone.

Another highlight was "Au fond du temple saint" by Bizet, a perfect fit for the tenor Matthew Polenzani and the baritone Simon Keenlyside, who outdid their respective forays into the Italian repertory earlier in the evening.

Ms. D'Intino gave a large if blunt "O don fatale" from Verdi's "Don Carlo." Mr. Dobber pumped out a doughty Rigoletto; and Maria Guleghina very nearly stayed on pitch in a relatively restrained "Pace, pace" from Verdi's "Forza del Destino."

The winner of this year's Tucker award for promising young professionals, the tenor Brandon Jovanovich, opened the evening by making pleasant but unremarkable noises in "Winterstürme," a piece that is still a few sizes too big for him.

AS an encore at her recitals Susan Graham often sings the song "Sexy Lady." Written for her by the composer and lyricist Ben Moore, it's the comic complaint of a star mezzo-soprano trapped in an endless round of trouser roles: lovesick adolescents in operas by Mozart and Strauss, dysfunctional knights in Handel.

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Susan Graham rehearsing the title role of 'Iphigénie en Tauride,' which she will perform Tuesday at the Met with Paul Groves as Pylade and Plácido Domingo as Oreste.

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Early in the Morning performed by Susan Graham (mp3)
Asie from Sheherazade performed by Susan Graham (mp3)Fans laugh, but honestly, Ms. Graham's feminine allure has never been in doubt. Just under six feet tall, she has always cut a glamorous figure on the concert stage, with or without the millions of dollars' worth of diamonds Cartier decked her out in two seasons ago to celebrate the release of her CD "Poèmes de l'Amour," a collection of French orchestral songs including Ravel's sumptuous "Shéhérazade." At the opera the flibbertigibbet Dorabella in Mozart's "Così Fan Tutte" and the heartsick Charlotte in Massenet's "Werther" have given her time off from the male roles she continues to perform with boyish panache. True, Ms. Graham has never tried Bizet's Carmen or Saint-Saëns's Dalila; their music, she says, wants a smoky sound that is nothing like hers.

But she was caught by surprise at the Houston Grand Opera premiere of Lehar's "Merry Widow" in January 2003, when she stopped the show simply by sweeping on in a dress and matching hat of fire-engine red. After a decade at the top of her profession this was her first taste of entrance applause. "I think I could get used to that," she said at the time.

On Tuesday, Ms. Graham, 47, opens at the Metropolitan Opera in the title role of "Iphigénie en Tauride," Gluck's account of the final chapter in the saga of the House of Atreus. The new production, mounted for Ms. Graham, is directed by Stephen Wadsworth.

"People think of Susan Graham as a sunny, lyric mezzo boy," Mr. Wadsworth said between rehearsals this month. "In a way it's unfair to judge her by her pants roles. She's always had this feminine complexity. People may have seen her Charlotte, but Charlotte is a domestic Biedermeier girl. Now they'll be seeing a real tragedienne."

Not that Ms. Graham is abandoning all her trouser roles. While she no longer sings Cherubino in "Le Nozze di Figaro," she will be returning to the Met at the end of the season as Sesto in Mozart's "Clemenza di Tito." She would love to do the Composer in Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" again, she said, and she is to reprise her signature role — Octavian, title character of "Der Rosenkavalier" — at the Met in 2009-10, even as she prepares the soprano role of Octavian's lover, the Marschallin.

In making that transition Ms. Graham will be following the example of the renowned postwar mezzo soprano Christa Ludwig, with whom she studied "Der Rosenkavalier" years ago. "Ludwig didn't like singing Octavian," Ms. Graham said recently. "She found him petulant. I never thought that. I try to imbue him with human qualities. But I've sung through the Marschallin with people in the room now, and it felt very good. I've lived intimately with that woman for 15 years. I've come to know her very well. I really understand her feeling for the mystery of the passage of time."

For now, apart from Octavian, Iphigénie is the role Ms. Graham has sung more than any other: nearly 50 times, in productions by Claus Guth (Salzburg), Krzysztof Warlikowski (Paris) and Robert Carsen (Chicago, San Francisco, London).

According to the ancient myth, Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon, sacrificed to the goddess Diana on the eve of the Trojan War — or rather, believed to have been sacrificed. Actually, Diana snatched Iphigenia from the altar and installed her as high priestess in distant Tauris. Gluck dramatized that part of the action in "Iphigénie en Aulide" (1774). "Iphigénie en Tauride" (1779) picks up the thread years later, when Iphigenia is called on to sacrifice her long-lost brother, Orestes. He by now has murdered Clytemnestra, their mother, to avenge Clytemnestra's murder of their father, Agamemnon. But Iphigenia saves him, and the cycle of bloodshed is broken.

In September the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, in London, opened the new season with Mr. Carsen's production of the second opera. Such an evening is always a landmark occasion, especially for the artist in the title role, but Ms. Graham kept it in perspective. "There are different kinds of breakthroughs," she said the next day. "Some are public-perception breakthroughs. Some are just personal breakthroughs, when you learn how deep you can dig, how many risks you can take. Sometimes it's not tied to a role but to the place you're at in your life. For me it's tied to confidence. You take a chance, and it pays off. You take another chance, and that pays off. You take a whole lot of chances, and you may need to back off. Sometimes the level of confidence is there, sometimes not."

Born in Roswell, N.M., and raised in Midland, Tex., Ms. Graham made her Met debut in 1991 as the Second Lady in Mozart's "Magic Flute." From two-minute ensemble parts (the page Tebaldo in Verdi's "Don Carlo," Meg Page in "Falstaff"), she made her way up to Dorabella, Charlotte and the major trouser roles. She lent luster to the premieres of John Harbison's "Great Gatsby" and Tobias Picker's "American Tragedy."