Susan Graham ravishing in recital

Susan Graham should lose her voice more often.

The velvet-toned mezzo-soprano, a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera, began her Schubert Club recital Wednesday by announcing that she had left her voice "at 35,000 feet" when landing at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. She warned of a truncated program but vowed to give it her best shot. And throughout the evening, she and Malcolm Martineau, a magician at the piano, shared the stage of the Ordway Center with a goblet containing an unidentified elixir -- "not wine," she teased -- which was a mute reminder of her indisposition.

In the event, Graham dropped only two of the 24 items on her taster's menu of 19th- and 20th-century French song -- a prodigious feat of program-making -- and navigated the rest with unfailing poise and presence. Slight, occasional mishaps became badges of honor; the singer seemed to relish the challenges imposed by her unwonted technical insecurity, which compelled a real-time rethinking of the music's demands.

"A performance is always an adventure," wrote the great French baritone Pierre Bernac, a master in this repertoire. But Wednesday's adventure, a lesson in in-the-moment musicianship, went far beyond the norm. Adroitly husbanding her vocal resources, Graham offered performances that I suspect were more intimately scaled and more tellingly characterized than they would have been otherwise. Her shrewdly stage-managed "loss" of voice changed the default relationship between performer and listener, engineering an uncommon identification between singer and audience and making for an evening more memorable than a technically impeccable delivery would have done. If there's a conservatory wise enough to school its students in turning the unhappy contingencies of concert life to advantage, Graham belongs on its faculty.

Graham's and Martineau's selection of songs -- mélodies, as the French call them -- tantalized novice and connoisseur alike. The heavyweights (Fauré, Debussy, Poulenc) were well represented. But so were uncanonized worthies (Émile Paladilhe, Alfred Bachelet) and composers almost never encountered except in this medium: Henri Duparc, perhaps the least prolific major talent in the history of music, and Reynaldo Hahn. (Though born in Venezuela to German-Jewish parents, Hahn was a wholly French phenomenon; he sang in salons, self-accompanied, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and was, for a time, Marcel Proust's lover. Graham has recorded an exquisite disc of his work.)

Graham may lack the elusive je ne sais quoi of great Francophone singers such as Claire Croiza and Ninon Vallin. But these songs are too rich to be surrendered to native speakers, and Graham, errant voice notwithstanding, sang them ravishingly, attuned to their shifting moods (wry comedy, poignant drama, melting allure), with even her breaths used to musical effect.

Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.