met von Stade in 1970, when he was recruiting singers for Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. After auditioning "the usual string of blowzy sopranos with orange hair", he was surprised to be confronted by a figure wearing a hat and gloves who might have just graduated from a prep school, "looking a trifle overly ladylike for one so young. ... I remember thinking that beneath the quiet beauty, one sensed something hidden and exciting. She was like those cool British actresses who suggest a burning intensity under the surface." He duly hired her to sing some Schubert, and in 1974 he invited her and her friend Judith Blegen to sing in Alice Tully Hall as guests of his five-year-old Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Subsequently, the Society chose her as the first singer to be admitted to their membership, and commissioned Christine Berl to compose Dark Summers (1989) for them to perform together. In 1996, Wadsworth invited her to join Lynn Harrell, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and himself at a concert given in Atlanta as part of the cultural festival associated with the 26th Summer Olympic Games. Von Stade's career as a high-profile recitalist began as early as February 18, 1970, when she shared a bill at the New York Cultural Center with George Allen Reid, a young operatic bass: a reviewer reported "a slight, pretty young woman with a fine, somewhat light voice", "a sensitive and canny interpreter of songs, using vocal colorations to reflect textual sentiments." She gave her first Carnegie Hall recitalrecorded by Columbia, but never released in a sold out auditorium on March 5, 1976. A critic from The New York Times overlooked her forgetting the words of Charles Ives's "Tom sails away" and collapsing on Michael Tilson Thomas's piano in a fit of embarrassed giggles, but spoke for several of his colleagues when he expressed his puzzled disappointment at the "rather peculiar assortment of songs" that she presented. Such strictures notwithstanding, an unapologetic eclecticism remained the essence of her approach to art song throughout her recital career. Frequently performing in small venues in provincial cities as well as in the grandeur of places like Covent Garden or La Scala, she sang arias and songs by, amongst others, Britten, Canteloube, Debussy, Dowland, Durante, Fauré, Ginastera, Honegger, Liszt, Mahler, Marcello, Mozart, Pizzetti, Poulenc, Puccini, Purcell, Ravel, Respighi, Rossini, Satie, Alessandro