Last year, as the pandemic started to show small signs of waning, Susan Graham performed her first recital, a small private affair in Scottsdale.
She had reached out to pianist Christopher Cano — a Tucson native and University of Arizona alumnus who leads Arizona Opera’s Marion Roose Pullin studio program and is the head of music — to accompany her. The two had never met before that performance, “but we just sort of really hit it off,” Graham recalled during a phone call from home in New Mexico last month.
“It was all just very serendipitous and surreal,” recalled Cano, who lives in Phoenix with his opera singing wife Jennifer Johnson Cano and their Chiweenie, Peanut.
As the two musicians chatted about their dogs — Graham has a year-old red miniature poodle named Ruby — and got to know one another, Cano mustered up the courage to ask a favor of the Metropolitan Opera superstar: Would she consider doing a recital for the 10th annual Tucson Desert Song Festival in February?
The answer: Which arm do you want to twist?
On Friday, Feb. 11, Cano will accompany the celebrated mezzo-soprano in a recital of one of her signature works by Berlioz and popular tunes by Broadway giants including Gershwin and Rogers and Hammerstein.
“We had such a good time planning that program in Scottsdale that consisted a lot also of popular works like cabaret and Gershwin tunes, that we decided to make the second half of the program those kinds of works,” said Graham.
This is only Graham’s second Tucson concert, and it marks an encore of sorts to her only other performance at the 2015 song festival during which she also sang Berlioz.
French music is her passion and her calling card going back to the early days her career.
“Berlioz has been one of my favorite, favorite composers since the beginning,” explained the 61-year-old who has done a number of Berlioz’s operas at the Met and around the world. “For some reason, his music always found its way to me, and I always found my way to his music.”
She will devote the first half of her program Friday to Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’été,” which she recorded years ago. The piece is a cornerstone of the French art song repertoire “and it’s just been such a favorite piece of mine, and I wanted to share it with (Tucson) audiences,” she said.
The song festival recital comes as Graham’s schedule starts to pick up steam. Last October, she joined Music From Copland House for the long-awaited world premiere of Richard Danielpour’s “Standing Witness.” The 65-minute piece, commissioned by Copland House, uses the poetry of Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove to traverse American history since the pivotal year 1968.
“It just touches on all these moments in American cultural history and political history and the life of Americans in the past 50 years,” said Graham, adding that the piece touches on everything from the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King to the Watergate, Vietnam, Roe v. Wade, the technology age and the 1980s yuppie generation of affluence.
“All of these songs are told from the perspective of the Statue of Liberty, so I am the standing witness to the history of America,” Graham said. “It is so cool.”
The show premiered in Chicago then made stops in Connecticut and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It moves onto Tanglewood this summer and Sante Fe, New Mexico, not far from Graham’s New Mexico home.
“I would love to bring it to Tucson,” she said. “We want to do it where we can.”
In addition to her recital Friday, Graham was expected to hold a masterclass with students from the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music.
She and Cano also plan to get their puppies together for a play date.
“I think they are Facebook friends,” Graham joked.
