By Pierre Ruhe

For the AJC

American soprano Christine Brewer and pianist Craig Rutenberg will perform Wednesday at New York’s musical jewel, Carnegie Hall. As a warm-up, Saturday night, the duo played metro Atlanta’s own regal space, Spivey Hall in Morrow. The recital opened Spivey’s 19th season with what it does best: present international artists performing music of uncompromising value in an intimate setting.

Although this was her Spivey debut, Brewer has a long history with the Atlanta Symphony — in concerts and recordings — back to the Robert Shaw years. The relationship continues now with ASO principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles, who has been mentoring her for the biggest soprano roles of all — hefty Wagnerian heroines from Brunnhilde to Isolde.

A large woman with a generous manner, Brewer is just-folks in her rapport with the audience. She joked comfortably Saturday about talking too much between songs and about her Atlanta allergies, although she was in the best voice I’ve ever heard her. Gargantuan yet subtle, her voice is rich and silken in tone. No matter how loud the approach to a dramatic phrase, Brewer always has more in reserve, and it comes as a pleasant shock to hear her double the volume at the climax, with never a hint of strain, never anything less than rapt musical sensitivity to the line.

After a powerful opening aria sung in immaculate French — Gluck’s “Divinités du Styx” (from the opera “Alceste”) — she gave us a taste of her Wagner, with his “Wesendonck Lieder,” a set of five songs the composer penned in the hothouse of adulterous love with poet Mathilde Wesendonck. The erotically charged settings became a study for Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”

Brewer inhabits these songs. She conveys the full breadth and lyricism of the music, and she made clear that she is blessed with perhaps the finest instrument of all active dramatic sopranos. They were gloriously — rapturously — vocalized.

Yet her German diction isn’t clear and, worse, she seemed to skim over the meaning of the words. There was little erotic or confessional in her interpretation.

It’s a problem inherent in our times, even at Brewer’s exalted level: Singers who have mastered the techniques and perfected the tones but don’t get what’s between the notes, at a loss to the storytelling aspect of the texts.

Three Richard Strauss songs were more roundly delivered, with “Befriet” (“Relieved”) a gorgeous, voluptuous farewell on the death of a spouse.

But, go figure, in the recital’s English-language second half, Brewer dispelled any notions that she couldn’t communicate in three full dimensions.

She sprang to life in four of Benjamin Britten’s “Cabaret Songs,” which set naughty, tactile, virtuosic poems by W.H. Auden.

With pianist Rutenberg playing out as a partner in the music-making, she revealed “Tell Me the Truth About Love” as a whimsical, despairing and profound meditation on affairs of the heart.

She infused the repeated title phase with a nuanced emotion on each passing, adding a little quiver for the word “truth” — conveying with language as much or more than she did with the notes and rhythms.

Pierre Ruhe blogs about classical music at ArtsCriticATL.com