Latecomer Establishes Specialty : Opera: Dolora Zajick, whom critics laud as a true dramatic Verdi mezzo, will be performing with the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa today and Wednesday.

Coming to opera late, when she was 22, mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick planned her strategy from the start.

“When I was at the age to start breaking into the business, I had one of two choices,” Zajick, 38, said in a recent phone interview from her home in Reno, Nev.

“I could either lie low and just do what would be considered my speciality or I could sing a lot of different things, but people would not see me for what I was right away.

“So I basically honed into two roles--Azucena (in Verdi’s ‘Il Trovatore’) and Amneris (in Verdi’s ‘Aida’). A lot of other roles are being added now, but this is my speciality. It worked. It established me. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind what I am.”

Indeed not. Zajick made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Azucena in 1988, opposite the Aida of Aprile Millo and the Radames of Placido Domingo. She also has sung at the Chicago Lyric Opera, the Houston Grand Opera and the Vienna State Opera and with conductors Riccardo Muti, Lorin Maazel and Zubin Mehta, among others.

Critics generally consider her that rare breed--a true dramatic Verdi mezzo.

Yet Zajick never planned to become a singer until she was in college.

“I was interested in becoming a surgeon, cardiovascular surgery,” she said. “I’m good with my hands and can make fast decisions. I work well under pressure. In a way there are a lot of similarities between medicine and music.

“Then when I was 22, I took voice class on a lark. One thing led to another. Before you knew it, I was singing chorus and small parts for the Nevada Opera Assn. I decided that’s where I’d rather be. I’d take a chance and become a singer.”

She credits Ted Puffer, the director of Nevada Opera, for launching her career.

“He taught me how to sing, basically,” she said. “I’m still working with him. The more I got out in the wide world, the more I’ve learned and have to compare with, the more I appreciate what he has to offer. I had no concept in the beginning the level he was at.”

With Puffer’s guidance, Zajick won the bronze medal in the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and entered the Merola Opera Program--eventually becoming an Adler Fellow--at the San Francisco Opera, where she sang her first Azucena in 1986 opposite Ghena Dimitrova. It was her first major role in a major opera house.

“What Merola and the Adler Fellowship offered was tons of experience,” she said. “I went in with very little experience. They provided that bridge so that when I did make my debut there, I was able to compete.”

She went on to win the prestigious Richard Tucker Award in 1986 and sang Amneris for Opera Pacific in 1988, opposite Leona Mitchell and Carol Neblett.

Orange County was to see her with Aprile Millo in Verdi’s Requiem with the Pacific Symphony in 1989, but orchestra management canceled the work in a budget-balancing move.

Zajick agreed to appear during the 1990-91 season. Millo stuck to the original dates, singing a grab-bag selection of excerpts from Verdi operas under the direction of founding music director Keith Clark.

Zajick is philosophical about the cancellation.

“In this business, you never know what’s going to happen,” she said. “Forever are there last-minute offers and last-minute cancellations. What I do is take it as a business, take it as a group. There are so many losses, so many opportunities you didn’t expect. . . .

“The more conservative I am, the faster my career moves,” she added. “I can be more selective and more careful about accepting roles. I don’t really plan to go into anything heavier than I’m already singing. Going into Wagner is out of the question.”

Still, she feels that even at this stage of her career she is vulnerable to poor conductors and stage directors.

“This is something a lot of people and critics don’t understand when they see opera singers just standing there and singing or when they aren’t singing well,” she said. “Well, there are a lot of conductors who look good to the audience because there’s a lot of energy in their movements. They put on their show. But they’re not cuing anybody or getting into tempo changes. Yet audiences go ape.”

Then there are the stage directors.

“A really good stage director will understand that every action is a reaction to a previous action, and that people should be responding to words you sing,” she said. “But once in a production, the stage director always had the other singer behind me. All I could was sing out to the audience or to the side, but not to the singer. I couldn’t turn around, otherwise I’d be singing upstage for the whole act. When the review came out, it said I just stood there.

“And once I did a ‘Trovatore’ where they say, ‘Tie her ropes tighter,’ and I wasn’t tied up! Or a stage director wants you to stand a certain way and it doesn’t read. You’re stuck in intergalactic tofu.”

For such reasons, Zajick prefers singing concerts to opera. “But only in the sense that fewer things can go wrong,” she said. “When opera comes off, it’s wonderful. But you’re less likely to get that.”