MUSIC REVIEW : Mezzo Diane Elias in Hometown Newport Recital

“Hi, everybody!” chirped Diane Elias before singing a note Sunday night.

The young American mezzo-soprano, a seven-year resident of West Germany, was launching a homecoming recital in the sanctuary of her church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian in Newport Beach. Radiant and pretty as a black-eyed Susan, she clearly felt special joy at being there.

She did not play down to the home folks, either, but chose a program of serious artistic merit--works by Schubert, Dvorak, Duparc, Saint-Saens and Britten arrangements of Purcell songs. A congregation that has followed her progress from nursery to Nuremberg turned out to welcome Elias with the warmth of an extended family, and for them she could do no wrong.

What a poignant surprise, then, her revelation of a voice not only unimposing by operatic standards but already showing signs of real wear and tear.

It is a voice of pleasant, darkish color, weak on the bottom, rather hooty and bottled-up in the middle and tending to emerge blanched-out and unfocused at the top. Its best moments occurred when Elias sang softly in the upper-medium part of her range; she cannily displayed this fact at every opportunity. At forte , anywhere in her compass, the sound became tremulous and projected poorly.

Perhaps Elias has no time, in a career so heavily operatic, to immerse herself devotedly in the rarefied, equally demanding world of the art song. Or perhaps her well-documented best only materializes in costume and character.

Her want of vocal repose is mirrored in excessive physical movement and extraneous gestures. Confusing caricature with characterization, she turned Schubert’s “Die Forelle” and “Der Musensohn” into Broadway turns, sort of “Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp Sings Lieder.”

“An die Musik,” which must be lit from within, was robbed of its essence by lack of legato. “Du bist die Ruh” was her best effort, though she rewrote one of the long ascending lines at the end.

Her Duparc songs also missed inner identification, with errors of phrasing and word elision suggesting that she has not listened carefully to a French singer do them. Here as elsewhere, the real poetry came from pianist Willem Wentzel.