Jamie Barton Opens Voce at Pace Series The superb mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, quickly becoming known for the flood of sound she can unleash, began her recital on Sunday afternoon singing against type. "Music for a While," written by Purcell and arranged by Britten, starts in stillness, and Ms. Barton quieted her tone into a float. The effects she achieved were subtle ones. "Your pains were eas'd," the song's text goes, and Ms. Barton gradually smoothed the repetitions of that final word so that "eas'd," well, eased. The flood eventually came - Sibelius's "Black Roses" was on the program, among other powerhouses - but Ms. Barton's tranquil moments were among the most memorable on Sunday, hovering even in the arid acoustics of the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. Not that her delicacy was any real surprise. The recital came on the heels of her two performances as Adalgisa in Bellini's "Norma" at the Metropolitan Opera, in which Ms. Barton's hushed prayers were as impressive as her full-cry high notes. Her tone both at the Met and at Pace, where she was inaugurating the Voce at Pace recital series, was remarkably consistent - as warm and full yet flexible and breathable as cashmere - from the piercing top to the simmering bottom of her range. Ms. Barton, who won the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition in June, has said she based her recital program, for which she was joined by the pianist Bradley Moore, on music she sang to secure that victory. She nodded to classic lieder with four Brahms songs, dug into gnarly Swedish consonants in a suite of Sibelius, showed off her American bona fides with cabaret-suave Ives and closed with Elgar's majestic "Sea Pictures," stinting on neither the bleak premonitions of death in "Sea Slumber Song" nor the lilt of "In Haven." Only in the triumphant phrases near the end of "The Swimmer," the final song in the Elgar cycle, did she sound a bit labored. Such a moment of passing strain - as in a few lines in "Norma" when rocketing coloratura pushed her pitch sharp - might give pause in another artist. But it served here just to highlight the generosity and riskiness of Ms. Barton's singing.