Sopranos Upshaw, Graham each have arias of expertise

Friday night at UC Santa Barbara, Dawn Upshaw performed in recital. Two nights later, Susan Graham appeared at the Music Center. These are two of America’s most appealing, best-loved singers, and they have a lot in common.

They are close in age -- early 40s. They are from the heartland and all-American. They are singers who can reach an audience. Indeed, they can reach an audience so well that both have been invited to sing for state dinners at George W. Bush’s White House, where classical musicians are not a common sight. They are wonderful singers who in recital work hard to put across a song. They are both in their prime.

And yet they left radically different impressions.

Upshaw’s was a joint recital with pianist Richard Goode, a very traditional affair for this model of the singer as adventurer. It was traditional in that the repertory was entirely classical, with nothing more modern than Debussy and nothing from America.

The evening was also radical in that it was a recital not as diva display but as chamber music, with singer and pianist taking equal billing and equal roles. Goode opened with a late Haydn sonata and played solo pieces by Debussy in the second half. Upshaw sang Schumann’s song cycle “Liederkreis,” in which the piano is an important participant, as it is in her other major selection, Debussy’s three songs “Fetes Galantes II.”

Goode rarely wanders from the classical realm, but he wanders within it with a special spunk. His Haydn warmed the intimate Campbell Hall. In Schumann’s lovelorn song cycle, he offered a wealth of detail while Upshaw brought broad, intense emotion. She is just back on the scene after being briefly sidelined by a minor surgery, and she didn’t sound entirely herself in the Schumann, her emotional intensity occasionally throwing her voice off its center.

But in the Debussy -- elegant, poetic, pure -- the soprano found herself. In a selection from Mussorgsky’s “The Nursery,” songs written from a petulant child’s point of view, she did what few if any other singer can do. She became the child, hilariously so, yet without ever seeming cute or false. A single encore, Schubert’s “In Spring,” transcendent lyricism from singer and pianist, will, I’m sure, stay with me throughout the season.

Graham, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which is more than three times larger than the 900-seat Campbell Hall, had to work much harder. She’s good at that. Perhaps too good at that.

A mezzo-soprano with a voluptuous yet agile voice, she sells songs by selling herself. Unlike the elegant Upshaw, Graham dripped in diamonds. She chose an excellent, facile accompanist, Malcolm Martineau, who brilliantly served her every need and, though with a cute trick or two up his sleeve, never dared upstage her.

The first half of Graham’s program was French, and with the fabulous range of colors at her disposal, she was ideal for witty, suggestive songs by Poulenc, for Ravel’s exotic “Chansons Madecasses” and three excerpts from Berlioz’s “Songs of a Summer Night.” Still, she tries too hard. In one Poulenc song, “Postcard,” Guillaume Apollinaire’s text evokes long fingers playing a dying scale on the piano, and so Graham’s fingers went walking.

The Ravel songs require flute and cello along with piano, and because the recital was sponsored by Los Angeles Opera, the company supplied flutist Heather Clark and cellist Rowena Hammill from its orchestra.

Graham has yet to come to terms with modern American music, although she is trying. Five years ago in “Dead Man Walking,” Jake Heggie created the role of the anti-capital-punishment firebrand Sister Helen Prejean for her, and she portrayed it vividly, helping bring an otherwise unimaginative opera to life.

Sunday she sang a recent Heggie song cycle, “The Deepest Desire: Four Meditations on Love,” based on texts by Prejean. Though she is a compelling prose writer, Prejean’s poetry is mawkish. Heggie’s music lacks personality, relying instead on Graham’s enthusiastically dramatic performance for its effect. A flute joins the piano for added texture and mood, and Clark supplied it.

Five songs by Charles Ives and four from Mahler’s “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” were the conclusion. All were alive. Graham can be funny, as she was in Ives’ “Memories,” and she clearly loves to be. She’s a good whistler too, it turns out. But her greatness lies in tragedy. In Mahler’s “The Earthly Life,” she found an inner voice and an inner pain. At last, she dropped the pretense, the diamonds stopped glittering, and she produced three minutes of powerful, profound singing.

Graham is a great singer, but her priority is to grab the glamour while she can. I hope she rises higher, the way Upshaw has.