New York City.(recital by Deborah Voigt)(Brief Article)

Few artists in Lincoln Center's "Great Performers" series have deserved the appellation as fully as Deborah Voigt, whose January 20 Alice Tully Hall recital was a triumph. Voigt and Brian Zeger, her indefatigable accompanist, presented a splendid program centered on the Germanic modernists of the turn of the last century -- Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss -- with other striking groups devoted to the American Charles Tomlinson Griffes and nineteenth-century French songs. Voigt was in refulgent voice, gloriously free in the repeated cries of "Adonis!" in Strauss's "Fruhlingsfeier," sinuous and sexy in Griffes's "Evening Song," bluffly assertive in Schoenberg's "Seit ich so vide Weiber sah." Her diction was immaculate, her delivery perfectly scaled, her tone coruscant.

Then came the encores, as cannily planned as the announced program that preceded them. After a diamond-bright conquest of Richard Strauss's chestnut "Zueignung," Voigt announced a new song "on a subject that's been on my mind a lot lately." The subject was the limitations of opera-house typecasting, and Voigt brought the house down with "Wagner Roles," a brilliantly funny (and quite catchy) piece by Ben Moore. A mock lament by a diva who yearns to sing Johann Strauss and other light-hearted fare but keeps ...