After melting the hearts of the Shanghai audience last week, one of the world's highest paid classical music stars hopes to wow Beijing with her warm and shining voice at the Beizhan Theatre (Beijing Exhibition Hall Theatre) tomorrow night.

"I wish my songs could bring joy and happiness to the audience in Beijing and I believe my voice would touch their hearts," Norman said before she gave a master-class at the Central Conservatory of Music this week. After the master-class, she was made an Honored Professor by China's best conservatory.

The American soprano will start with arias selected from Verdi's opera "Aida," followed by a few pieces from Mozart. Then she will move to a French program including Bizet's "Carmen" and Saint-Saens' "Samson and Delilah."

The concert will end with melodies from her home country including songs by Gershwin and Bernstein. The program gives full play to Norman's wide range of repertoires and showcases her  ability to absorb the flavor and accents of different languages.

She is equally at home with American spirituals, French chansons or German Lieder. In opera, she has made Wagner's Sieglinde and Elisabeth her own but also Gluck's Alceste, Mozart's Countess Almaviva, Strauss' Ariadne and Stravinsky's Jocasta. From Haydn to Mahler to Schoenberg and Berg, from Satie and Poulenc to Gershwin and Bernstein, the range of Norman's musical reach is breathtaking.

No matter what the language, she makes every word count, and every note tell.

"The greatness of music speaks for itself when Jessye Norman sings," wrote Octavio Roca in The Washington Post after one of Norman's early Kennedy Centre recitals. Reflecting years later in The Washington Times, he wrote "listening to Jessye Norman finding her way into a song is like watching in wonder as a beautiful morning reaches the climax of noon. Warmth and blinding light are everywhere in her voice."

That same formidable voice was described by Edward Rothstein in The New York Times as "a grand mansion of sound. It defines an extraordinary space. It has enormous dimensions, reaching backward and upward. It opens onto unexpected vistas. It contains sunlit rooms, narrow passageways, cavernous falls."

Norman was born into a musical family in 1945 in Augusta, Georgia. Norman's mother, Janie Norman, was an amateur pianist and ensured all of her children took piano lessons and sang. Her father, Silas Norman was an insurance broker, singing frequently at the family's Baptist church. In this environment, it's no surprise Norman became a singer. But even more to the point, she enjoyed performing and did so often as a child and teenager whether at school, church, or at Girl Scout meetings even once appearing at a supermarket opening.

She recalls falling in love with opera when she was 9 years old after hearing a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera.

Norman pursued her formal musical studies at Howard University, then later at the Peabody Conservatory and the University of Michigan School of Music. "She had all of the tools she was very intelligent, a keen musician, and a voice with qualities you encounter a few times in a generation. I've never heard another like her in all my years at the UM," said Willis Patterson, associate dean and professor of music at the University Michigan, who, recalling being impressed by her voice, joined the faculty about the same time as Norman studied there in late 1960s.

She made her operatic debut in a 1969 production of "Tannhaeuser" at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

(China Daily October 26, 2006)