FROM WAGNER TO WESTERN

Spotlight

They're all tough women," says Deborah Voigt. "They're pretty determined chicks." The dramatic soprano is referring to the roles she has taken on this season, a trio riding high in the saddle: Minnie, the California mining-camp sweetheart in Giacomo Puccini's La Fanciulla del West; Brunnhilde, the Valkyrie heroine of Richard Wagner's Die Walkure; and, last but not least, Annie Oakley, the sharpshooting celebrity of Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun. "The universe just sort of presented it," Voigt says, and the

congruence "was too much to pass up." After a year as the soprano of choice for centennial performances of Puccini's verismo Western (in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago), Voigt dons the Wagnerian armor this month for the Metropolitan Opera's new production of the "Ring" tetralogy. Brunnhilde marks the pinnacle of the dramatic-soprano repertoire, a career-defining role. Berlin's 1946 Wild West show, which opens at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York, in July, presented both an oddly logical progression and a gratifying detour. Francesca Zambello,

Glimmerglass's artistic director, wanted Voigt to be this summer's artist-in-residence, working with apprentice singers on a day-to-day basis; the prospect of playing Annie Oakley proved a most effective bribe, a chance for Voigt (who "literally fell into the world of opera," as she puts it) to return to her first love, musical theater. It puts her in the company of those other amazing American singers— Grace Moore, Rise Stevens, Eileen Farrell— who alternated operatic achievement with a populist devotion to, well, doing what comes naturally.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI