An Operatic Voice Retuned For Cabaret

Listening to Patricia Racette sing popular songs at the Neue Galerie on Thursday and recollecting her Madama Butterfly this season at the Metropolitan Opera posed the interesting question of where her natural voice lies, or if natural voice means anything.

As Cio-Cio-San in Puccinis beloved potboiler, Ms. Racette admirably fills an oversize opera house with her altitudinous soprano. Working amplified in a small room for about 15 tables of listeners digesting their dinners, Ms. Racette made sounds that were strikingly darker: sometimes in a contraltolike belt, alternating between various purrs and growls, and at selected moments opening up fully in operalike climaxes. The big Puccini notes had evidently been left home in a drawer.

Ms. Racette uses the restricted dimensions of cabaret style wholeheartedly but with discretion, and the aura of opera stardom that she adds to this different world fits well into Carnegie Halls broad cultural survey called Berlin in Lights, now in full swing around the city. Ms. Racettes success begins in a love for her material, which ran from Kurt Weill through Gershwin to Stephen Sondheim. More than just delivering texts, she fondled and stroked them. Weills Berlin im Licht was in German, most everything else in English.

Pop singing is a form of composing, and from a song like Vernon Dukes Not a Care in the World one inferred the painstaking forethought and strategies of a trained musician: how long the phrase length, where the breath comes, where to hold back or let go. Opera singing ought to be about understanding words but rarely is. With so much vocal resonance, so much space to sing in and a physical mechanism more engineered than spontaneous, this is hard to do.

Ms. Racette easily crosses over to popular song first because she is an American; the right gestures are permanently in her ears. She also had Paul Trueblood, more a sensitive partner than a standout piano virtuoso, but a big part of the evenings success. The good-natured patter between numbers sagged at moments but was generally agreeable.

Ms. Racette chose her songs well. The subtle melodic contortions of Johnny Burkes Heres That Rainy Day were enough to get any harmonists attention. Made touching, too, were the Michael Leonard-Russell George Not Exactly Paris and Johnny Mandels elegiac Where Do We Start?, a song rendered so memorably by Shirley Horn.

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