Diva in disguise

“I have a feeling I’m being watched very closely,” Susan Graham said, smiling straight into an overhead security camera and brushing fingertips against the fancy-yellow-diamond drop earrings that lent their playful accent to her borrowed $6-million parure.

The scene was Cartier on Fifth Avenue, where the mezzo-soprano whom many friends call Suzy was celebrating the release of her new CD, “Poemes de l’Amour.” Never had the famed jeweler honored a classical musician in such fashion. As guests nursed tulips of Champagne and sampled elegant finger food, Graham spun out two songs by Debussy, shocked but undeterred by a cellphone that rang just as the first was ending, pianissimo, on a shimmering F-sharp. Eyes widening, she held the note to a serene conclusion, welcoming the ensuing moment of silence with a look of expectant rapture.

“Oh,” she says eagerly later when that look is commented upon, “it’s like when you give someone a present that you just know they’re gonna love.”

These days, Graham, 44, is getting used to being watched very closely, and not merely by the guards at Cartier. Since modest beginnings in two-minute parts at the Metropolitan Opera a decade and a half ago, she has soared to the peak of her profession. In 2004, Musical America, the classical music industry’s trade bible, named her vocalist of the year. In February, her CD of songs by Charles Ives won a Grammy for best classical vocal performance. And those will surely not be the last tributes to her bittersweet timbre, crystalline technique and unaffected expression.

An athletic 5 feet 11, Graham continues to cut a dashing figure in the trouser parts that made her name, from lovesick adolescents (the pageboy Cherubino in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro,” the highborn Octavian in Richard Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier”) to knights and nobles beset by more grown-up conflicts (in Mozart’s “Lucio Silla,” “Idomeneo” and “Clemenza di Tito” and Handel’s “Alcina” and “Ariodante”).

At the same time, she is branching out into more ladylike parts. Recently, her tragic eloquence as the forsaken Dido, queen of Carthage, has won particular acclaim, both in Purcell’s Baroque chamber opera “Dido and Aeneas” (recorded by Virgin Classics, and another Grammy nominee this year) and in the Berlioz epic “The Trojans” (captured live on DVD at the Theatre du Chatelet, Paris).

Tonight, Graham will make her Los Angeles recital debut at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion under the aegis of L.A. Opera. She plans to wear the same strapless dusty-rose dress she wore at Cartier, and once again, she will be dripping diamonds. “White ones,” she specifies a few days after the reception as she lounges on a couch in her Manhattan condominium, the proverbial stone’s throw from Lincoln Center, midway through a run of “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera. “I picked them out today.”

Curiously, the published program for tonight’s recital features nothing from her new CD. Instead, Francophiles can look forward to generous servings of Poulenc, Ravel and Berlioz. The American strain, meanwhile, is represented by an Ives group and by Jake Heggie’s recent song cycle “The Deepest Desire,” written for Graham to texts by Sister Helen Prejean, the real-life crusader against capital punishment whom Graham portrayed in Heggie’s opera “Dead Man Walking” at its world premiere three years ago in San Francisco.

“Jake was driving Sister Helen to the airport one time,” Graham says, “and he said to her, ‘You always talk about doing God’s will. But how do you know what that is? How does anyone know what that is?’ And she said, in that simple way she has, ‘You listen to your deepest desire. And whatever that is, that’s God’s will.’ ” Graham grabs the score and begins reciting the words, about wanting to lose oneself, about wanting to be with God. “But getting to heaven takes a long time,” Sister Helen writes at a striking juncture. And then: “Is there life before death?”

Glamour proves elusive

The passage that touches Graham most reads, “Cultivate friends with care. It is the best love of all.” Apart from her love of the way Heggie set these words, the sentiment resonates strongly with a woman who is unattached and lives a life on the road.

“People are always asking, ‘Isn’t your life glamorous?’ ” Graham says. “I tell them -- NO! Ten days from now, I’ll be trudging to the airport with a poodle and a hundred pounds of luggage.” By herself? “Yes, by myself.”

On this day off, she is relaxing in jeans and lime-green suede running shoes that match her knit top. “OK, being at Cartier, singing those songs at a party they threw just for me -- that felt glamorous.” And yes, it should be glamorous to play a bit part in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” currently filming in Paris.

What part? “The opera singer,” Graham replies with a toss of her head. Negotiations about what she will sing are not yet settled, but certainly it will be something by Gluck. Graham is resisting pressure to sing the popular lament from “Orpheus and Eurydice.” Her preference is for the lesser-known lament of the heroine from the celestial “Iphigenia in Tauris,” written in arching phrases with which Graham has wrung tears from the jaded -- but indisputably glamorous -- audiences of the Salzburg Festival.

Glamour: It’s a recurrent theme on both sides of the footlights. And the property is hard to pin down. Generations ago, opera singers epitomized star quality. These days they don’t, and a reigning cliche of opera profiles is that whoever is in our sights today is definitely not a diva. Graham, renowned for her rollerblading, has sung that tune even in a four-page spread in Vogue, a publication not notably hospitable to the musings of classical artists whose names aren’t Renee Fleming. Isn’t there a contradiction? How, without glamour, is her presence there to be accounted for? And Vogue is hardly the only glossy to have featured this particular un-diva. In addition to the obligatory covers of special-interest publications (Gramophone and two issues of Opera News, on one of which she was seen gunning a motorcycle), Graham has made the pages of Vanity Fair and Town & Country.

“Divas in sneakers!” Graham says, laughing, about herself and others in the same boat. “Wanting to be the girl next door. But that’s because so many of us are the girl next door. In the United States, we’re not rarefied creatures. It’s not a situation where only the elite get a musical education. Nowadays, it seems like nobody can get a musical education. But in my generation, training was available to anyone who wanted it.”

Another curious fact about contemporary opera singers -- and not only the Americans -- is that so many seem to have set out to make careers in some other line of work: musical comedy, gospel, rock ‘n’ roll. How about Graham, who was born in Roswell, N.M., a farming town of 44,000 souls (plus credulous seekers of UFOs)?

“If you grow up in the hinterlands,” she says, “you don’t get much exposure to opera. But every high school used to put on musicals.” Graham’s first performing experience was in the chorus of “Carousel.” She was, however, a classically trained pianist with a deep love for Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, Bartok.

“I had an appreciation for the whole musical language. I studied singing because I liked it. And at school, they tell you what to learn. They weren’t going to teach me ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’ They taught me songs by Brahms and Faure.”

Maybe being born into a tradition is not the advantage it is cracked up to be. Maybe what counts most of all is the pioneer spirit: a drive to conquer worlds one has only imagined. “Later, at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock,” she says, “I could have majored in musical theater. But I chose music instead. I wanted to do something that was hard to accomplish.” Her stage presence today -- cultured and classy yet approachable and warm -- is the perfect reflection of the solid hometown values she grew up with and the cosmopolitanism she has achieved.

A presidential connection

Between Roswell and Lubbock came Graham’s teen years in Midland, Texas, the hometown of President Bush, whose second inauguration she graced with her rendition of “Bless This House.” A political statement?

“Absolutely not!” she says. “It was an apolitical statement! I was invited to participate in a unique American experience, and as a unique American, I was honored to accept.”

It turns out, moreover, that Graham’s association with the family of her fellow Midlanders began in January 2003 at the Houston Grand Opera, where she was appearing in the title role of Franz Lehar’s evergreen operetta “The Merry Widow.” Her entrance in a big red dress with a big red hat brought down the house, even before she had uttered a sound -- a first in her experience. Loving it, she sent an invitation to the first President Bush and his wife, Barbara, who have a home in Houston.

“They couldn’t come,” Graham says, “but he invited me to his office, and we had a wonderful talk about family and Midland and mutual friends. And I told him I had this song I wanted to sing in the White House.” She got her wish at a state dinner on May 19, 2003, in honor of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, president of the Philippines. “I did a 30-minute program in the East Room, with dessert. Every face you’ve seen on CNN was there. I ended with ‘Bless This House.’ Then the president came and put his arm around me and said, ‘Susan, I thank you. You have indeed blessed this house.’ ”

Glamour, in a word, is something Graham is learning to live with.

Does she collect jewelry? “I might start,” she says.

What, though, is the right jewelry for a rollerblader?

“Wrist guards!” she roars, extending her hand. “Do you see that scar?”

*

An L.A. recital debut

Who: Susan Graham

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 tonight

Price: $10 to $90

Contact: (213) 972-8001 or www.losangelesopera.com