Saving the day is practically old hat for Youngok Shin.
The amiable Korean-born, coloratura soprano rescued Baltimore Opera Company's season-opening production of a rarely staged work, Delibes' Lakme, when the originally announced star had to bow out.
On much shorter notice, Shin has done the same for the company's production of Verdi's Rigoletto this week, stepping into the role of the hapless Gilda for a singer who canceled. (She'll sing three performances; Nicole Biondo, already hired to sing two, will also sing three, starting with tonight's opener.)
And it was as Gilda that Shin unexpectedly made her Metropolitan Opera debut, pinch-hitting as understudy for an indisposed colleague. She had never sung the role onstage before but scored such a success that she was quickly engaged for more work at the Met.
Finding herself back in Baltimore so soon after her appearances in Lakme doesn't really surprise the soprano.
"When my manager called to tell me they had asked me to fill in, it was so strange," Shin says, "because I had already had a dream that I would come here to sing Gilda. I feel very comfortable here; people are so supportive. It feels like home."
Baltimore Opera general director Michael Harrison is among those supportive people.
"Youngok is an extraordinary talent, an accomplished artist and a good colleague," he says.
"I am not happy that [Italian soprano] Stefania Bonfadelli decided not to come at the last minute. That's bad for us - but better for the audience maybe.
"I was delighted when I found out Youngok was free. She was a great Lucia last season; she was wonderful when she helped us out with Lakme after [Korean soprano] Sumi Jo canceled. And she's a wonderful Gilda."
Scheduling problems prevented Shin from singing the first Rigoletto performance; she is in the midst of working in New York on her role Perela, l'homme de fumee by contemporary French composer Pascal Dusapin. Its world premiere is scheduled in Paris in February.
"It is very, very difficult," the soprano says of the new work. "I don't know how I'm going to learn it. But it's a good challenge to learn modern opera. That's why I said OK. I don't just want to sing traditional repertoire."
Still, Shin's way of lighting up traditional repertoire with her silvery voice and astute phrasing has given her a solid international career that includes performances at leading opera houses in Europe, Latin America and the United States.
Coincidentally, the role she first sang in several of those houses, including London's Covent Garden and the Opera Bastille in Paris, is the one she's about to sing in Baltimore.
"Gilda has been for me like a calling card," Shin says. "I sang it in Beijing and at a 100-year-old opera house in Hanoi for the first opera performance in Vietnam in 35 years."
The amoral, unnamed duke in Rigoletto is the catalyst for the sequence of events that cause hideous consequences in the opera; the title character, the duke's hunchbacked court jester, is the epicenter of that tragedy. But Rigoletto's daughter, Gilda, is its heart.
"There are so many beautiful things to sing in this role," Shin says, "the duet with the tenor, the duet with the baritone, the last scene. How can you lose? Gilda is pure and childish and all that, but she is also a woman. She is poor, innocent, so young and so in love."
The last scene exerts a particularly strong hold on Shin. This is when Rigoletto discovers that his own daughter, stuffed dying into a sack, has become the victim of his revenge plot against the duke.
"Every time I am in that sack, singing 'I will be in heaven, near my mother,' I get tears; I am crying," she says, "because my mom passed away in 1993. She wanted me to be a world star. When I sing that scene I know she can hear me, I know she must be happy."
Shin's parents provided plenty of encouragement when she began to show musical talent. By the age of 4, Shin had sung on a television show in Korea. She went on to join a troupe of young performers that toured the United States with programs of Korean music and dance; that trip included an appearance with Liberace in Las Vegas.
"We were called the Little Angels," Shin says. "It was very difficult; we trained like Spartans in acrobatics and ballet."
The training may account for how gracefully and naturally Shin moves onstage, as Baltimore Opera audiences saw last month in Lakme.
Other early pursuits also paid off in the long run for the singer, who earned degrees in music from the Juilliard School in New York, the city where she has lived for 20 years.
"There is much more music education in Korea than here," she says. "I studied voice in middle school and high school. I learned a lot of classical music, including lieder - Schubert and Brahms. When I got to Juilliard, I was already ahead because I knew so much repertoire."
Shin's parents expected their daughter to return to Korea fairly soon "to teach and get married" after Juilliard. None of that has happened.
"Every day I was studying in New York I walked past the Metropolitan Opera and thought, why not for me?" Shin says. "I was dreaming to sing there. After I did get to do that, my mother said, 'OK, you can have your career.' But now that he's alone, my father keeps asking when I am going to come back home."
Shin does get back to Korea at least once a year to give a benefit concert.
"I have my own scholarship fund for students," she says. "The concert raises money for it. My foundation also puts on a voice competition to help young singers. I promised my mother that whenever I earned money, I would always share with young Korean singers who didn't have the money to study. It is important to share my talent with other people."
Although she may not get back home often, Shin still retains close ties to her heritage. She keeps a Korean cable TV station tuned to her set in New York; when she's on the road, including her trips to Baltimore, she brings along Korean spices, a rice cooker and chopsticks so she can make her favorite meals.
"I still feel very Korean," she says, breaking out into a smile. "I still eat lots of garlic, so I can't always talk to people, but I don't care."
As for her future in music, Shin is determined to keep her agile voice in shape by refusing roles that do not neatly fit her technique and tone. Gilda will stay ("I want to do this role as long as I can"); so will Lucia.
"A teacher told me that my specialty is purity and clarity," Shin says. "I don't want to damage that.
"I would love to do more Mozart. And I'd really like to try [Donizetti's comic operas] Don Pasquale and La fille du regiment. I don't always want to be sad and dying onstage."
Rigoletto
When: 7:30 tonight, 8:15 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Nov. 20, 8:15 p.m. Nov. 22, 3 p.m. Nov. 24
Where: Lyric Opera House, 140 W. Mount Royal Ave.
Admission: $37 to $132
Call: 410-727-6000