Bel Canto Booster

"You were wonderful,'' said Maria Callas, "but you owe something to me, you know. After all, I persuaded you to sing roles like Lucia." She was speaking to a big, square-jawed Australian woman named Joan Sutherland, a former secretary who has won a sudden but solid reputation in the Bellini-Donizetti territory that Callas calls her own. Last week Soprano Sutherland, 33, was appearing at Britain's stylish Glyndebourne Festival in Bellini's I Puritani. On the lawn at intermission, as they were consuming their hamper-packed chicken-in-aspic suppers, members of the black-tied audience buzzed that Joan could already stand comparison with the incomparable Maria.

Puritani takes place in Cromwell's England, where the Cavalier hero daringly dupes the Roundheads, but in the process is forced to abandon his betrothed, Elvira, who goes insane. Soprano Sutherland's triumph last week was that she made her audience overlook the opera's gothic absurdities and focus on its moments of real beauty, including Elvira's pre-wedding aria, "Son vergin vezzosa," and her splendid "Qui la voce sua soave," which introduces a mad scene every bit as effective as the more famous one in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Her voice was precise, agile, light-textured and luminous. The London Observer praised her "extraordinary beauty of tone,'' and the Daily Mail found in her performance an "almost intolerable poignancy.''

Oddly enough, Soprano Sutherland started out in an entirely different style, hoping to be a Wagnerian singer. The daughter of a Sydney tailor, she took her first voice lessons from her mother, a "nonprofessional mezzo-soprano," won a number of local competitions and with the prize money decamped for London. At Covent Garden auditions, she learned that the Wagner repertory was not for her: "My voice really isn't heavy enough for that, and I soon understood that I'd been forcing it along a road that was wrong for it."

She heeded the advice of her Australian pianist husband, Richard Bonynge, began concentrating on coloratura parts and on the little-performed 18th century Italian bel canto repertory. Now, on the living-room wall of her Kensington home, Soprano Sutherland has a picture of one of her idols: Singer Elizabeth Weichsel Billington, reputedly the mistress of George IV, who almost singlehanded brought bel canto opera to popularity in England in the early 18th century. Joan Sutherland sees no reason why she cannot perform the same service in the 20th century. "I will be happy," says she, "if I can just sing in every opera Bellini ever wrote."

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