MUSIC REVIEW : Mezzo Jane Bunnell Sings at Ambassador

If the voice were all that mattered--the sheer sound of its physical properties--Jane Bunnell would have every reason to rejoice.

The mezzo-soprano, who finally arrived Monday at Ambassador Auditorium after having to cancel her Gold Medal series recital last season, makes glorious sounds most of the time--the kind that explain impressive recent credits at the Met, for instance.

It is a voice of rich, seamless tone that pours out generously in a steady effortless flow, one that hazards no register breaks, that darkens or lightens on command, that has ample power to project to the galleries, yet can narrow to meet lyric challenges.

And if choosing a tasteful, varied program were second in importance to voice Bunnell could pride herself on the agenda she presented: Mozart, Saint-Saens, Granados, Brahms and Bernstein.

But if the art of recital singing is all-encompassing, if it involves manner, mood, nuance, magical communication of interior states, the suspension of disbelief--in short, the ability to create drama while standing alone on a bare stage and hold an audience in thrall, then Bunnell has some distance to go.

With no aura, no mystery and precious little grace she made her case in the plainest terms--up to and including a gown and non-hairdo that accentuated the negative.

Sometimes a little personal unease can create its own effective tension, but this singer could not benefit from such manifestations, as evidenced in her poorly prepared, poorly delivered lines. “This song,” she said, of Saint-Saens’s “La solitaire,” “is about a very, very male chauvinist.”

Even with little instinct for exhibitionism Bunnell handled the rest of the composer’s “Melodies persanes” well, especially “Sabre en main,” in which she telegraphed a young man’s heroic exploits in high-flown terms. Pants roles would seem the thing for her.

A Mozart aria found her coloratura to be less than pristine, however, while in a Brahms group she held to an unvarying stance of stoicism that, even so, delivered the exquisite Angst of “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer.”

Bunnell revealed a glimmer of a Fanny Brice persona as Dinah (Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti”), and sang two encores: “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix” (with breath glitches) and a song from “Peter Pan.” Joshua Greene was her able accompanist.