Felicity Lott, Basking in a Wistful Glow

When Dame Felicity Lott took the stage at the Austrian Embassy on Wednesday night and began a set of Mahler songs, the 61-year-old soprano was not in what she, being British, might call the vocal pink.

The first song, "Ich atmet' einen Lindenduft," was dry and patchy, the voice hovering at the outer edge of speech rather than lifting aloft. Yet the second song, "Liebst du um Schoenheit," was so direct and beautiful that, flawed or not, it could give you chills. Art, Lott might as well have said, is about more than simply raising your voice.

Lott did, however, warm up just fine in her Vocal Arts Society performance. When she came out for her second group of songs, by Schumann, she had shed the gold shawl she had been wearing, and a figurative weight along with it; her voice sounded more limber and free. Lott is a performer who finds the pleasure in her music; she projects a likable, eager persona, wanting to do her best by the songs she is singing. This leaves her, at times, slightly at the edge of her music, offering it up with a hint of polite anxiety rather than owning it. At other times she basks in it, happy to be allowed in. She was at her best in the lilting, dancing "Singet nicht in Trauertoenen" by Schumann and Hugo Wolf's "Fruehling uebers Jahr," lighthearted songs with small touches revealing the riches of deep color.

The Wolf set was the evening's highlight. Wolf is stamped a miniaturist, but his songs are more like tiny, compressed operas, and the four Lott selected were not even all that tiny. Furthermore, the set had a narrative progression, from the bright flowers of "Fruehling uebers Jahr" to the plants growing over "Anacreon's Grave" to a descent into that grave in "Mignon III," in which, in the persona of the heroine of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," Lott took on a tone that was both girlish and otherworldly. The logical conclusion was the better-known "Mignon" song "Kennst du das Land," in which Lott's voice took on the warmth of the blossoming fruit the character describes -- just one example of the singer's ability to shade her voice to fit the nuance of a particular song, a phrase or even a word.

After intermission came a French set of four different composers' settings of Baudelaire, to which Lott suited even her gown, changing into a Fortuny-style column that evoked the early 20th-century milieu of the composers. It was not an entirely convincing group vocally or musically. Not surprisingly, it showed that Debussy was a better composer than Pierre Capdevielle, though the straightforwardness of Capdevielle's setting reflected the modest poverty evoked in "Je n'ai pas oublié." Debussy's "Le Jet d'eau" sounded like genius in contrast, liberating the accompaniment to flow and play around the words rather than dutifully supporting them. But the real hero of the French set was Henri Duparc. His classic "L'invitation au voyage" opened the set, and it closed with "La vie ntérieure," another song with an emphatic, operatic quality that called for some big singing at the very edges of Lott's current vocal estate, while Graham Johnson, her accompanist, pounded out the emphatic setting of the line "les tout-puissants accords de leur riche musique" (the all-powerful chords of their rich music) on the piano.

Johnson was generally a little fey, embodying without entirely supporting his reputation as a high priest of accompaniment. If Lott was self-conscious, Johnson was deliberately showy, putting a lot of his music into figurative quotation marks. He has also played this music a lot, and sometimes it sounded like it.

The program ended with encores effectively built in. The final set was an extended homage to the late French vocal star Yvonne Printemps, with a set of songs from "Conversation Piece," a show Noel Coward wrote for her in 1933, and three songs to texts by the actor-director-writer Sacha Guitry, Printemps' husband. Lott accompanied the lighter mood with a figurative kicking off of the shoes; she assumed a heavy French accent, coquetted with the piano and the audience, and clearly enjoyed herself. It was all very enjoyable, though it didn't ultimately eclipse the memories of the Wolf. And there was a slightly wistful feeling to Lott's evocation of the past; after all, she herself won't be doing this kind of thing forever.