E-Mail This Article to a Friend Sexy ladies Susan Graham, Waltraud Meier and Edo de Waart at the BSO — plus the Cantata Singers’ St. Matthew Passion BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Mezzo-soprano Susan Graham first struck my eyes and ears as Jordan Baker, Daisy Buchanan’s golf-pro friend, at the Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby. More than six feet tall, attractive, appealingly American, with a suave, beautifully placed voice — how could she not command attention? Now a singer of international stature, she made her first local appearance last week at Jordan Hall, with pianist Brian Zeger, in the FleetBoston Celebrity Series. If every vocal recital were as good as this one, vocal recitals might have bigger audiences.

Graham made her entrance in a low-cut but severe black gown, with a high collar (like the Wicked Queen’s in Snow White). She sang two song cycles, one in German — Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder ("Gypsy Songs") — and one in French — Debussy’s four Proses lyriques, settings of his own Baudelairean prose poems, which drip with morbid synæsthesia ("the desolately green tedium/Of the greenhouse of sorrow"; "this mad noise/Of the black petals of boredom"). These late Brahms songs combine the romantic earnestness of his Liebeslieder Walzer crossed with the tongue-in-cheek rhythmic syncopations of Johann Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron and the "Csárdás" from Die Fledermaus. Graham sang them with energy and refinement, taking pianissimo high notes on important words like "gelopt" ("vowed") with ease. Her high mezzo is seamless from bottom to top, and though it’s rather unvaried in color, she’s a master of dynamic nuance — the expansion and contraction of volume.

With Zeger’s diaphanous and eerie accompaniment, the cooler Debussy was even more intense. Graham kept her gestures to a minimum. In the fourth song, "De soir" ("Of Evening"), she imitated a mechanical signal light by keeping her arms stiffly at her sides. The entire sequence was beautifully shaped, reaching its climax in "De fleurs" ("Of Flowers") — "Come! Come! Saving hands!/Break the glass of lies . . . My heart dies from too much sun!" — and then floating down to a quiet conclusion in "De soir."

After intermission came a gorgeous reading of Berg’s Seven Early Songs of love and nature. When Graham returned after the applause, the high collar was replaced with a burgundy boa, which she flicked shamelessly in a broad yet still slyly witty rendition of Poulenc’s Quatre poèmes, to Apollinaire, in which surrealism takes a decidedly comic turn ("If we were Artists/We would not say cinema/We would say movies"). And these she followed with three operetta numbers from her latest album — all with delicious mime (this Carmen stabs the matador, and Graham "wiped" the bloody blade against her dress).

The short program ended at 9:30, but she and Zeger were ready for the demand for encores. The first was an exquisite Reynaldo Hahn imitation of an 18th-century song. The second, to prove, Graham said, that she could sing in her own language, was the Gershwins’ "Someone To Watch over Me," which had, I thought, the most eloquent phrasing of the evening. Without exaggerating the rhymes, she hit all of them in "Although he may not be the man some/Girls think of as handsome," and her slight pause before "handsome" let us hear the quotation marks. This was Graham at her most touching.

Her last encore was the campy "Sexy Lady," a tongue-in-cheek diva "scena" by Ben Moore ("He wrote it just for me," Graham confided) about the plight of the mezzo-soprano, whose low range forces her to play male characters:

I’m so tired of kissing chicks.

It isn’t so great

If you’re single and straight

And you want your kicks.

The audience ate it up. If every cheering ticket holder tells a friend, there won’t be an empty seat for Graham’s next Boston concert.