Singer McNair rings in New Year with Minnesota Orchestra

Even at 10 in the morning over the phone, Sylvia McNair is just as much fun as you'd expect from someone with her spiky platinum hair, ebullient smile and gutsy reputation.

"I'm doing a double," said the versatile two-time Grammy winner, who will sing Gershwin with the Minnesota Orchestra in back-to-back concerts next Wednesday. "And there's a Champagne after-party? Will I be asked to stand under the mistletoe? We'll have to make some hay out of that."

The concerts, which will also include some surprise orchestral pieces to be announced from the stage, are the first New Year's Eve performances the orchestra has played since 1998, and the very first under the baton of musical director Osmo Vänskä.

"I've never worked with Osmo before, but I love Swedes," McNair said. On being told that Vänskä is Finnish, she laughed, "Oh, go ahead and put that in anyway."

No one could accuse McNair of being afraid to try new things. After performing operas at the Met, recording with Neville Marriner and winning two Grammys, she reinvented herself in the late 1990s as a musical-theater, jazz and cabaret singer. She now teaches voice at Indiana University while continuing to perform with major orchestras across the country and in Europe. She has recorded more than 70 albums, most recently a Christmas CD and a Latin-American jazz collection. She has sung command performances for luminaries ranging from Pope John Paul to the U.S. Supreme Court.

McNair has sung with the Minnesota Orchestra many times, beginning in 1985, when she performed the Bach B Minor Mass with Charles Dutoit conducting. Most recently, she did a Gershwin show in 2011, for which Star Tribune reviewer Larry Fuchsberg dubbed her "one of the best in the business." She was scheduled to come back in 2013, when the whole season was canceled during the lockout, during which she worried about the musician friends she has made here over the years.

"Orchestra musicians are amazing people," she said. "They're not uncomplicated, to put it mildly, but I'd rather hang out with them than other singers, maybe because I'm a violinist at heart."

"In hindsight I fell in love with singing because I could use words, lyrics, to connect with people," she said.

McNair shocked many of her fans by leaving opera and oratorio behind in the late 1990s — including canceling several appearances at the Met — to embark on a new career. What prompted such a risky change?

"The short answer is burnout," she said. "People call opera the Olympics of the voice. I'd been doing it for 20 years, and it's a stressful life to be on the road 10 months a year. A girl gets to her early 40s, you start asking yourself different questions. I gave up income, along with some professional credibility, to follow my heart. And I've never regretted it."

She performed in several concerts feting the respective 100th birthdays of the Gershwin brothers, who hold a special place in her personal hall of favorites.

"If you asked me to choose my favorite American Songbook composer I'd have a tough time, but George was the first one I fell in love with back as a kid," she said. "When I first heard his Concerto in F, that just lit my fires."

"When I sing lyrics like 'But Not for Me' and 'The Man I Love,' I think, songwriters may die, but the same issues go on. Love never goes quite the way we wish it would."

In 2006, McNair was diagnosed with breast cancer and told she had six months to live. Over the next two years, she underwent chemo, radiation and multiple surgeries including a radical mastectomy.

"I got through it with sass, stubbornness, vanity, anything I could find," she said. "Now my health is better than ever, the cancer story is feeling like ancient history. My oncologist kicked me to the curb two years ago. Get out of here, you're done."

Her illness and scrape with mortality gave her a lot more than it took away, she said: "Clarity about how I want to live the rest of my life, greater compassion, and a kick-ass hairdo."

Terrified of being bald, she wound up buying seven different wigs, in shades ranging from blond and brunette to lime green and pink. She now lends them to other cancer patients.

And the voice, please. We'll take the voice.