A Fast Track to ‘Carmen’ : The Role Takes Graves to the Top

“Good morning Mr. Jones--this is your wake-up call.”

“That was me, using my most dulcet tones,” says a bright-eyed, spikey-moussed Denyce Graves, recounting how she worked a graveyard shift at the switchboard in a Boston hotel while attending the New England Conservatory of Music.

“But what I was also dying to say was: ‘I’m a singer, too,’ ” she squeals in outrageously high notes, “because my callees were cast members of the Metropolitan Opera touring company and the phone message to them was the closest I could get my voice--four years ago--to an opera stage.”

Not to worry now. The tall, curvaceous mezzo sings the title role in “Carmen,” which opens Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, courtesy of the Music Center Opera. Opposite Placido Domingo, no less.

And if her spirits seem to be soaring it’s with good reason.

Suddenly, Graves is, as they say, hot. Within two years of completing a Houston Grand Opera apprenticeship she has already landed onstage this fall at the prestigious Vienna Staatsoper--substituting for Agnes Baltsa’s Carmen there, as here--and in San Francisco, where she made her debut in a walking cast (having broken a foot in rehearsal).

One would think there is some kind of Carmen shortage.

But Graves has her own savvy explanation about why, since Vienna, the calls are coming at a clip:

“Impresarios like to be discoverers of new talent or, at least, quick to sign a singer who, they think, will have a big career. In my case what they have to go on are the credentials--like the Staatsoper and Placido as a partner three times already.”

As she points out, there are no recordings to confirm the rush; it’s too soon for that. So directors tend to rely on her glowing reviews and word of mouth. Still, the old saw about success begetting success applies to Graves.

When she reported to a colleague the time sequence between being an apprentice and appearing at the Staatsoper, she was asked: “Didn’t you skip a few steps?”--referring to most American singers who pay a decade of dues at small European houses before reaching the international platforms.

“Well,” she laughs, “that’s true. So is the fact that I’ve known my destiny since childhood. The kids in grade school called me ‘Hollywood.’ And when I started serious voice study at 14, the others (at Georgetown’s Duke Ellington High School of Performing Arts) also saw me as an outcast. They liked pop music.

“But it wasn’t until Oberlin (Conservatory) that I knew for certain where I belonged. The minute I walked through the door and saw everybody else--’weird,’ just like me--I was home.”

There were many detours along the way, however. Graves, a native of Washington, D.C., recalls that her father left the family when she was 2 and how poverty colored her world.

But work proved a way out; she necessarily took longer to obtain her college degree because of the many jobs she held.

It was at a Maine resort, while waiting tables for a Jewish clientele and singing at night in the hotel’s cabaret shows, that Graves learned a few more things.

As she served a family who had already asked if the kitchen had lox and bagels and matzo ball soup--foods new to her--they engaged her in conversation: “Did you have any siblings?”

“ ‘Wait a minute and I’ll ask the kitchen,’ I said, thinking it was another dish,” Graves recounted.

Graves, who seems to have no pretensions, tells this joke on herself with good humor--just as she rattles off all the other little jobs that paid her tuition: taco maker, doughnut baker, dormitory cleaner, grocery clerk, bookbinder (“but all the toxic glue fumes were a throat irritant”).

In short order she has become a Carmen specialist, having sung in at least five different productions. And she has contracts to sing the role in Florence with Zubin Mehta conducting, at Covent Garden, again in Vienna, Washington, Houston, Geneva, Genoa and at festivals in France and Austria.

The bookings extend through 1995, and “by that time I’ll have Carmen coming out of my ears.”

Judging from the reviews, though, and the seriousness with which Graves approaches the fatalistic Gypsy girl--she has read the Prosper Merimee novel to prepare and tries “not to be influenced by Baltsa or Maria Ewing and others”--she probably can find enough interpretive material to keep her busy.

“The single most important dramatic element is having a strong Jose,” she says, “someone who doesn’t pull energy away from you but who has his own power.”

Domingo--that rarity, a tenor tall enough to stand beside the statuesque Graves--more than qualifies. She calls him Platheedo, correctly pronouncing the Spanish sibilants.

But there are no prima-donna affectations, no English accent and such. In fact, Graves says she would not restrict herself to opera if other options--a movie?--came along.

For the moment, however, it’s the lyric muse that absorbs her.

“Every day the calendar changes,” she says, her husband David Perry, a lutanist and concert guitarist, nodding in agreement. “We returned to Washington from Vienna just long enough to wash our clothes and get here.

“Only a fool would not love it. This is, without any question, a fabulous time of my life.”