Elaine Alvarez, From Stand-In to Star

It's one of the legendary American success stories: The star of a production falls ill, walks out or gets fired, and a hungry, untested newcomer steps in to save the day. Sixty-four years ago, Leonard Bernstein made his reputation when he took over a national radio broadcast of the New York Philharmonic for an ailing Bruno Walter; in 2002, the tenor Salvatore Licitra won his Metropolitan Opera debut when Luciano Pavarotti (who died in September) bowed out of some scheduled performances of "Tosca."

Something along these lines happened to the young Cuban American soprano Elaine Alvarez, who was serving as the understudy for Angela Gheorghiu in a production of "La Boh¿me" in Chicago last month. The Lyric Opera management, understandably miffed after Gheorghiu missed six out of 10 rehearsals, told the Romanian diva to take a hike and Alvarez found herself singing the role of Mimi on short notice, to public and critical acclaim.

On Tuesday night, Alvarez made her local debut in a recital at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater sponsored by the Vocal Arts Society. Here, too, she was a stand-in (the German soprano Anne Schwanewilms had been scheduled to perform but withdrew because of illness) and here, too, she made a winning first impression.

Had she been given a longer time to prepare, I'm sure that some aspects of this recital would have been tweaked. The program Alvarez sang was more often intellectually interesting than musically memorable -- some middling songs by the Scandinavian composers Wilhelm Stenhammar and Bo Linde, some Liszt (including the rarely heard vocal arrangement of the famous "Liebestraum"), a smattering of Richard Strauss and two fascinating miniatures by Jean Sibelius. This calls for an awful lot of different nuance in a single evening and it could be argued that Alvarez overreached herself. Moreover, she often forgot that she was singing for a hall seating fewer than than 500 people, rather than trying to fill a cavernous opera house with sound, and there were times when she was simply too loud.

That said, Alvarez is a charming artist -- with a delightfully warm stage presence and a healthy, hearty and agile voice that is still coming into flower -- and it does not surprise me that she made a terrific Mimi. She was quite wonderful in a closing set of Spanish and Cuban songs by Fernando Obradors and Eduardo Sanchez de Fuentes, in which she stepped out of what had sometimes seemed an interpretive corset and relaxed as though the hall were filled with old friends, which, by the end of the evening, seemed to be the case.

Thomas Bagwell was the smart, venturesome and supportive pianist.