BLYTHE IN BLOOM.(Stephanie Blythe)

STEPHANIE BLYTHE WILL SPEND THIS SUMMER IN VALHALLA, COURTESY OF SEATTLE OPERA'S RING CYCLE. WAGNER, HANDEL, IRVING BERLIN: IS THERE ANYTHING THIS YOUNG AMERICAN MEZZO CAN'T SING?

Sunday, January 21, 2001. The Theresa L. Kaufmann Concert Hall at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y is packed, despite the cold weather and the much ballyhooed birthday celebrations for a certain tenor being held across town. At 3:00, a heroically proportioned young woman strides onto the stage, her recital costume some softly draped trousers, an elegant, extravagantly patterned blouse and a pair of broad-heeled, sensible shoes. She is the afternoon's main attraction: American mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe.

In the past five years, Blythe, a small-town girl from Mongaup Valley, New York, in the Catskills, has emerged from the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program to establish herself as one of the most interesting and accomplished singers of her generation, able to adapt her voice and personality to a wide range of characters and musical styles. Her instrument is gorgeous -- sunny in texture, generous in scope, noble in feeling -- and her technique rock-solid, but in a mezzo-rich marketplace (Blythe herself has termed it "the mezzo glut"), what sets her apart is her particular brand of wit and intelligence. Blythe's brains are evident not only onstage (in her surgically precise comic timing, for example) but off, in her unerring ability to choose the correct role at the correct time. Still in her early thirties ("My very early thirties, thank you!"), Blythe has scored a knockout in just about everything she has taken on, be it Wagner (Fricka at Seattle Opera), Offenbach (La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein for L'Opera Francais), Rossini (L'Italiana in Algeri at Opera Company of Philadelphia), Bizet (Carmen for Tulsa Opera), Handel (Cornelia in Giulio Cesare at the Met), Donizetti (Orsini in Lucrezia Borgia for Opera Orchestra of New York) or Verdi (Mistress Quickly in Paris). She's also one of the best young recitalists in the business, and the Y audience senses that this will be a red-letter afternoon.

Blythe nods firmly to pianist Warren Jones, and the recital begins with "To the Land of My Own Romance," Victor Herbert's gentle portrait of a would-be prima donna. Blythe's glowing, amber-colored voice flows through the hall, warming her chilly audience to a summertime temperature. Stephen Foster's classic ballad, "Beautiful Dreamer," follows, its familiar words shaded with tenderness, its sentimentality held in check by the singer's emotional discipline and her pellucid, unmistakably American diction. The audience is now ready for the centerpiece of Blythe and Jones's program: Alan Smith's song cycle Vignettes: Ellis Island

Written expressly for Blythe by Smith, an old colleague and friend, Vignettes is a sprawling, ambitious piece, a collection of more than twenty first-person narratives about the experience of coming to America via Ellis Island. Blythe plays all the characters -- male and female immigrants from a dozen European points of origin, ranging in age from five to twenty-two -- with brilliant economy of voice and gesture. She is vital, unfussy and piercingly direct, jerking tears (the shy, subtle lift of her head to suggest a nine-year-old boy looking for his father) and winning belly laughs (the devastatingly timed grab at the piano to suggest a seasick Polish woman) as needed. Blythe doesn't characterize overtly, in the manner of an impressionist "putting on" another voice to suggest another person, but somehow these men and women emerge as distinct personalities who all happen to look and sound exactly like Stephanie Blythe.

Blythe shows off her comedy chops in the second half of the concert, an album of turn-of-the-century American parlor songs, of the Tin Pan Alley variety. The difference between Blythe and most opera singers who attempt to play comedy is that Blythe is really funny. Whether the opportunity for a laugh is small (the discreet yet eager rubbing of Mustafa's pearls on her teeth in L'Italiana in Algeri) or great (a mock-tragic fit of petulance with an unlit cigarette in Christopher Alden's modern-dress Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein), Blythe lands it. No false heartiness, no cutesiness, no winking at the crowd. She gets from the audience the kind of good solid laughs that any musical-theater actor or professional comic would kill for.

This afternoon, Blythe sashays, struts, purrs and growls her way through Sterling and yon Tilzer's "Coax Me" with the zest of a seasoned vaudevillian. Unlike most large women (at least those who make a career in opera), Blythe moves like a dream, her feet sliding through near-glissades, her hands tracing breezy circles in the air as she covers the stage. In this and the numbers that follow, Blythe doesn't sound like an opera diva slumming; she sounds as if she were born to sing this stuff. When she descends the scale, she doesn't use the granitic chest voice some opera singers flash; the plush she owns in her upper voice and her mid-range stays deep and firm. She looks happy to be doing it, too: watching her make a meal of "After You've Gone" is a rare treat, from the first cocked eyebrow to the bang of her hand on the piano as she exits, with a shout of "I am OUTTA here!" (She's actually leaving the stage briefly to allow Jones a solo of his own.) Her easygoing rapport with Jones is evident throughout the program: when she flubs a line of patter, Blythe turns to the audience and moans, "I screwed up my shtick!" and Jones cracks up. Blythe and Jones nail a four-song Irving Berlin set and then finish the afternoon with a single encore, a gleeful scat through an old Judy Garland number from Thousands Cheer, "The Joint is Really Jumpin' in Carnegie Hall," a neat comment on the combination of popular music with a "legit" venue.