Just for the Joy of It

“Music is the best lover you can hope to have,” Sylvia McNair says across the long-distance phone line from the Santa Fe Opera, where she stars this summer as Anne Truelove, the good girl who gets left behind in Stravinsky’s modern classic “The Rake’s Progress.” The lilt of her voice conjures up the scrubbed, apple-cheeked face that lights up concert halls around the world and is emblazoned on record jackets. “No matter how much you give it, it gives back more.”

The way McNair, 40, tells it, she is, very happily, a square peg in a round hole. Growing up in Ohio, she sang in choirs “for fun,” but what she dreamed of--and was preparing for--was a job as a violinist with the Cleveland Orchestra or maybe the Chicago Symphony. Then, midway through a music major at Wheaton College in Illinois, she suddenly realized that another instrument might be a better choice: her own voice.

McNair is still singing for fun, but now as one of the most sought-after sopranos of her generation, noted for her cool, sweet tone, limber technique and her string player’s exacting ear. “Singing such as one does not deserve to hear,” was the assessment of the Times of London, “the tone perfect, pure and silver-bright from first note to last, the . . . phrasing so right one just takes it as the way the music breathes.”

Earlier this year, McNair’s CD “The Echoing Air: The Music of Henry Purcell” took the Grammy for best classical vocal performance. Singing in English gives McNair particular satisfaction, all the more when the audience is English-speaking, too. “There’s a wonderful bridge we can build, breaking through the fourth wall,” she says, involving the impalpable yet often impenetrable barrier between the stage and the spectator. “Direct communication--that’s one of the best things about being a singer.”

Expect plenty of such bridge-building on Wednesday in the all-American program under John Mauceri that marks McNair’s first appearance at the Hollywood Bowl. McNair’s contributions range from Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” written in a serene classical idiom, to a pop anthology of such tunesmiths as Kern, Gershwin, Arlen and Sondheim. For her, this is not a reach. You will hear a Midwestern twang in her show tunes and jazz that never touches her Purcell or Mozart, but she agrees that on another level all music must be sung in one way: from the heart.

Ordinarily, McNair would use amplification only when working the pop side of her repertory. At the Bowl, of course, everything has to be miked--which will not prevent McNair from observing the proper stylistic distinction between operatic and popular technique.

“It’s like the difference between being a stage actor and a film actor,” McNair says. “The way a film actor is most successful on camera is very different from the way a stage actor is successful on stage. Singing the way classical singers are taught to sing, trying to fill a theater, without electronics, you have to have explosive energy. Slingshot every sound into space! Singing the way pop singers do, with a microphone, less is more. The tiniest things become suddenly very big.”

When it comes to the classical, McNair prefers the smaller venues of Europe to such cavernous American counterparts as the Met. “The first time I walked into the Vienna State Opera, one of the great opera houses of the planet,” she exclaims, “I could not believe my eyes. From the edge of the pit to the back of the room there are 18 rows. One-eight! I counted. The total capacity comes to about 2,200 seats.”

After McNair’s first dress rehearsal at the Met, capacity 3,700, four seasons ago, she was handed a note from the director that read, “Whatever you do, stick your face into the house and sing as loud as you can.” For McNair (who is now a Met regular, and due back in November as Tytania in Britten’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”), the instruction was an absurdity. Microphone or no microphone, McNair’s own instrument is not large; she scores her points with refinement rather than big noise.

And hers is not the standard-issue operatic ego. “One of my biggest challenges,” she acknowledges, “is that I still have the personality of an instrumentalist but have chosen the profession of a vocalist. I’m always trying to fit in and always feel that I kind of miss. I’m the sort of performer who thinks that the best musicians in the room are in the orchestra. If the orchestra likes what I’m doing, that’s the greatest compliment of all--much more important than anything the music critics say.”

Following this credo, McNair decided five years ago never to read another music review. “The bad ones always make you feel worse than the good ones make you feel good,” she reasons. “We all know in our heart of hearts when we’ve given a great performance or just a good one, and that’s what matters most.

“I don’t want to live on that level,” she says. “I don’t want to get dragged down by the nonsense in newspapers. Music critics couldn’t possibly get up and do the kind of work they presume to judge. My joy in music isn’t polluted or tarnished by someone saying what I do is good or bad. I make music because it gives me joy. The joy of it is the motor that keeps me going.”

* Sylvia McNair sings with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, Wednesday at the Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., 8:30 p.m. $3-$63. Information: (213) 480-3232.