A Thought About Song Preparation

I was recently reading an article on Christiane Noll - a question and answer type of article. Christiane is one of those artists that gets every bit of life out of the song. Many times, like she did in Ragtime, she finds different angles or bits of the song that people formerly blew over. In the article, which I now can't find, she talked about how she separated out the preparation. There is the music, the ebb and flow, the music line, and the technical work behind that. Most singers at her level do not have to work at that because they have fined tuned their instrument to the point where it will naturally do what it should. She looks at the text - the whole and the individual, and then takes the text out of the music. She said something to the affect that her next step of preparation was to tell the whole story without the lyrics - to do it only through the music and her acting. And that is how she gets the performance she gets! Amazing! She's also hysterical!