This fall in Nashville is the season for magical mezzo-sopranos. A couple weeks ago, Jessye Norman sang a titanic Wagner program with the Nashville Symphony that earned her a lengthy, clamorous standing ovation—and she wasn’t even at the top of her form. In another couple weeks, Adria Firestone will raise her rich voice in the title role of Carmen, also at TPAC. And this Saturday evening Denyce Graves is coming to perform a solo recital at Langford Auditorium. Graves’ career is powering its way into orbit, fueled by the role of Carmen, which she has sung in Canada and in Europe, as well as at the Metropolitan Opera with Placido Domingo.

Those who witnessed her at the Met tearing the heart out of Placido’s bosom know that Denyce Graves has a rich, strong, subtle dramatic voice. She is a young woman of magnetic “lynx-eyed” beauty, and she is a gifted actress who uses expression, gesture, and movement as well as her voice to portray Carmen as a complex woman.

Graves’ power in the part has drawn enthusiastic reviews from all over. For one West Coast critic, that power was not diminished when she sang the role with the San Francisco Opera wearing a cast on one foot. “After the initial visual shock,” the critic writes, “the cast on her foot became unimportant.” Like Jessye Norman, she has a whole lot of what theater people call “presence”—the power to draw eyes and ears just by walking onstage.

Besides Carmen, she has sung the role of Dalila in Saint-Saêns’ Samson et Dalila, again opposite Placido Domingo. While Ms. Graves’ Carmen seduces by challenging Don José’s machismo, her Dalila knows that sinuous voluptuousness will win the day because Samson is afflicted with testosterone overload. She beguiles a man who wants to be beguiled—and then has to kill himself to do penance. One Philadelphia critic observed, “Whoever sings Delilah [sic] has to have a voluptuous voice in a first-class body, some wag has written, and how good it is to report, Graves has both. The voice is magnificently potent and ringed with authority and beauty.”

Several critics remark on how mature the singer’s voice is despite her youth. She is just 32, and for singers in her league, that’s usually the beginning of a career. Like an NFL quarterback, a singer of the world’s most vocally demanding music does not usually mature early. Great singers such as Leontyne Price (b. 1927), Jessye Norman (b. 1945), and Kathleen Battle (b. 1948) also made their debuts at this age and did not peak for another 10 or 15 years.

Graves not only portrays strong and audacious women on the operatic stage, she also sings audacious solo recitals—as she is to do here. Many opera singers avoid solo recitals because such concerts carry with them special musical and linguistic demands. Luciano Pavarotti is perhaps the perfect example. Even performing as one of The Three Tenors, he rarely sings in anything but Italian. (He should not be permitted to sing except in Italian, and if he ever tries to sing in French again, his throat should be cut.) Denyce Graves, however, sings varied and challenging programs in several languages, and sings them very well.

Carmen, the role she has become famous for, is of course in French, and even a Montreal critic found her use of the tongue fort acceptable. In recital she sings a lot of French music—she is to do so here—but she is also quite adept at German, Spanish, Italian, and English. In each of her languages, she sings texts that listeners can understand.

She sings a varied repertory, from Duparc and Gluck through Elgar to the cabaret songs of Schoenberg. Saturday’s program (subject to change, though any changes will likely be minor) begins with Tre poesie persiane by the 20th-century Italian composer Francesco Santoliquido—settings of three ancient Persian texts sung in an Italian translation. She is to sing some Puccini in Italian, some Bizet and Saint-Saêns in French, some marvelous Brahms lieder in German, and seven Spanish canciones populares in settings by Manuel de Falla. The program will conclude with a set of African American spirituals.

Such a program, maybe even more than an operatic role, will demand from her a range of dramatic personae, and should permit her to show off the scope and subtlety of her skills as a performer.

She has come a long way from her birthplace in Washington, D.C., where she was raised, she recalls, in “a gritty neighborhood of stark and featureless brick apartments near the Blue Plains sewage treatment plant and the D.C. auto impoundment lot.” Her father, now a Baptist minister, left her, her mother, and her two sisters when she was a year old. When she was 8 years old, experimenting with cigarettes belonging to an aunt, she set their apartment on fire. “We lost everything.”

She and her sisters, raised by their mother, began singing in church. But it was not until she went to the Duke Ellington School of the Performing Arts in her home city that she recognized what she wanted to do. There, at 14, she heard the incomparable Leontyne Price—another African American phenomenon, whose voice had lifted her out of Laurel, Miss., in the 1950s to international operatic acclaim—and decided “I can do that.”

She did it well enough to be offered full scholarships to a number of colleges. But she chose to follow several of her teachers to Oberlin College, where she often worked three menial jobs at the same time to pay her way. Just as her career was blossoming, she came down with an enigmatic vocal ailment that threatened to end it. She dropped out of competitions and stopped singing for a year. She went to work as a secretary in a hospital, where a doctor diagnosed her ailment as a treatable thyroid problem.

Almost as if on cue, she was invited to audition with the Houston Grand Opera. She refused. They called again. She refused. They called a third time, and friends persuaded her to accept. She has not looked back.

She does not, of course, do it alone. Her accompanist at Langford will be pianist Warren Jones, whom the San Francisco Examiner has called “the single finest accompanist now working.” Jones has performed with a long list of the world’s most celebrated singers, including Marilyn Horne, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Kathleen Battle, and Samuel Ramey. On the faculty at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City, he is a rare and distinguished practitioner of an art often taken for granted—except by singers. They know that, in a very real sense, they are at their accompanist’s mercy. Jones, like an NFL offensive lineman, is a treasured full partner in the enterprise—even though the quarterback gets most of the credit.

The singer he will undergird is enjoying enormous success right now. Her debut at the Met was the subject of a segment on 60 Minutes. She has been singled out by USA Today as one of the singers “most likely to be [an] operatic superstar of the 21st century.” She is at once proud and humble in the face of her success. As an African American singer, she is keenly aware of the tradition she works in, reaching from Marian Anderson through Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle down to herself. She wants, she says, to continue that tradition—so that other black children can look at her and say as she did, “I can do that.”

The opportunity to experience her doing it, so soon after the charismatic Jessye Norman, is a rare and wonderful treat. She is not yet ready to rival Jessye Norman’s incandescent dramatic presence. Vocally, though, she might well perform even better than the older diva did.