Song and Anecdote by Mezzo Guzman

There are a lot of classical music performers nowadays who think that talking with an audience will make a concert a more user-friendly experience. That’s not necessarily so.

Mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzman, who appeared at Luckman Theater at Cal State L.A. Sunday, talked almost as much as she sang, inserting jokes and reminiscences of her East L.A. childhood into her preambles, and calling the amalgam an “urban recital.� But the effort was only episodically successful.

While Guzman can spin a fine anecdote and she told a few good jokes, in the course of talking about the music, her chatter didn’t always set the proper mood for the pieces that followed. The directness of speech and the poetry of music are always an uneasy mix.

When she did sing, with Catherine Miller as accompanist, Guzman offered selections by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Ian Krouse, Luis Antonio Ramirez, Massenet, Barber, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and others, engagingly performed. She made words important, her diction crisp and clear.

She also proved an exceptional colorist, bending vowels insinuatingly, adding and subtracting vibrato like an early music string player. Her voice blossomed warmly in “Va! Laisse couler mes larmes!� from “Werther� and in “Olga’s Aria� from “Eugene Onegin,� and she floated plush pianissimos.

The concert ended in a light fashion with a group of lullabies including “Baby Mine� from “Dumbo,� sing-along carols (with Guzman’s impression of Carreras singing “Jingle Bells�) and that must for every mezzo, the Habanera from “Carmen.�