Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an opera singer born in Detroit of a Dutch mother and a father who was of Sioux Indian ancestry She's known as a performer who can act as well as she can sing at the age of 18 she met the American conductor James Levine who became an important

influence on her career. At 26 she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in

New York singing Carabino in the marriage of Figaro. But it was under another

important man in her life, Peter Hall, that she achieved some of her greatest

successes, including a controversial common and a daring salamie. She's wowed them at Earl's Court and the proms in the park where

she's been equally happy singing jazz and popular ballads as she is grand opera.

Singing is the means, she says, but it's what you're delivering that really matters.

She is Maria Ewing.

And does it matter which you're delivering, Maria, or don't you mind?

I love them both. I always have. Obviously classical music was the focus of my life for most of my years.

But because the popular music was so much a part of life growing up in Detroit,

I've always listened to it and thought, you know, there's something in me that must express this somehow.

But that's part of the actress as well in you, isn't it, that you have to feel what you're singing about.

Very much, though. I think that's what it was like from the very beginning.

When I began seeing in the school choir, I felt very emotionally involved.

I was always a bit emotional about everything.

But it's interesting that Simon Rattler said that you could have been an actress if you hadn't been a singer.

Would you have liked to have been an actress?

Were you pleased me the other way?

I've never thought about acting.

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