Susan Graham Launches Recital Tour Today

Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Susan Graham launches a four-date U.S. recital tour today with pianist Bradley Moore in Myrtle Beach, SC, with the trek including the singer's Kimmel Center recital debut in Philadelphia on April 2. The recital program of Purcell, Berlioz, Poulenc and Cole Porter will be drawn from Graham's second Onyx album, Virgins, Vixens & Viragos. In a review of the recording, the UK's Sunday Times noted: "It's hard to think of another contemporary singer who could pull off the tour de force Graham achieves here, with numbers ranging over a period of almost 300 years." Back in New York on April 26, Graham will perform a special concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The program - titled "Sculpting Sound" and held in conjunction with the exhibition The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux - will feature the music of the 19th-century French sculptor's friends and collaborators, including Bizet, Gounod and more. Graham will be joined by pianist Brian Zeger (director of the Juilliard Vocal Arts Department), as well as by bass-baritone Evan Hughes and soprano Layla Claire. This summer, Graham will cap her season in Paris by making her role debut as Anna in The King and I at the Théâtre du Châtelet (June 13-29).

In the classic Rodgers & Hammerstein musical comedy The King and I, Graham will be co-starring with French film star and singer Lambert Wilson, under the direction of Lee Blakeley and choreographer Peggy Hickey. It was with this same production team that Graham recently proved "spectacular" (Santa Fe New Mexican) in the title role of Offenbach's The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein at Santa Fe Opera, where she headlined the company's season-opening new staging of the comic masterpiece.

In London this spring, before she heads to Paris for The King and I, Graham joins Charles Dutoit and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Royal Festival Hall to sing one of her signature pieces: Berlioz's orchestral song cycle Les nuits d'été (May 14). And in Spain, she revisits Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with Madrid's Orquesta Titular del Teatro Real under Christoph von Dohnányi (May 22).

So far this season, Graham has ranged from touring Europe singing Mahler and Schoenberg with the Ensemble InterContemporain and performing Ravel's Shéhérazade with Bernard Haitink and the Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall to starring in the hit Baroque pastiche The Enchanted Island at the Metropolitan Opera. The mezzo - who has won the Opera News Award and been named Musical America Vocalist of the Year, as well as received the French government's Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur - was also seen on national TV earlier this year with the PBS Live at Lincoln Center broadcast of the all-star "Richard Tucker at 100: An Opera Celebration."