When Susan Graham, the Grammy Award winning mezzo-soprano, steps onto the Kennedy Center Concert Hall stage Saturday, she will be gowned in white. Her attire reflects the innocence and purity of the angelic women she is about to portray musically. In a dramatic switch of personality, she reappears for the second portion of the recital garbed in black, a signal that one of opera’s most talented actresses is about to inhabit the soul of Lady Macbeth and her evil musical sisterhood.

“This has been such fun to go into the many aspects of women, their relationships and the situations they find themselves in,” she said. “Music always comes first, but as I channel the character in my head, the empathy I feel for her is often determined by the costume.”