Sooner or later every diva wants to sing at Carnegie Hall. Diamanda Galas had her debut there on Thursday night, before an adoring crowd dotted with Halloween outfits. Her recital was billed as "Malediction and Prayer: Concert for the Damned." Ms. Galas sat at a piano and sang about death. She borrowed songs from Phil Ochs, Johnny Cash, Son House, the Supremes and Billie Holiday, and she performed her own settings of death-haunted texts in French, Spanish and Italian. In true diva style, the center of attention was the singer, not the song.

Ms. Galas has a thousand voices: cackling, whispering, teasing, shrieking, pleading, yelping. She can make notes quaver and break or sustain pure tones; she can preach and declaim, or slur lyrics to the edge of intelligibility. She does accents, too, from high-flown enunciation to Southern drawl. And she swoops down on songs like an implacable bird of prey, wringing effects from every phrase.

Her piano playing was mostly rudimentary: tolling octaves, foreboding trills, rippling blues licks; now and then, she alluded to Chopin's transparency or Rachmaninoff's crashing chords. Nearly every tune was a dirge, giving Ms. Galas more time to linger or swoop. She reveled in extremes, sound haggard with despair as she turned the Supremes' hit "My World Is Empty Without You" into a mourner's testimony or lashing out in "Let My People Go," with her own lyrics about the AIDS epidemic. The only option she didn't explore was understatement.

Despite Ms. Galas's lung power, she chose to amplify both her voice and piano. The electronics allowed her to use reverb and harmonizer effects, but they also battled Carnegie Hall's acoustics.

Some of Ms. Galas's material thrived on her virtuosity. Johnny Cash's "25 Minutes To Go," the countdown of a man about to be hanged, made its way from bluster to fear to awe. In her setting of Tristan Corbiére's "Cris d'Aveugle" ("Blindman's Cry"), she evoked the vehemence and microtonal finesse of flamenco singing. And in Willie Dixon's "Insane Asylum," she sounded nearly deranged, moving from dark mutterings to wild ululations.

But some songs were so mannered they turned into kitsch, like her version of Phil Ochs's "Iron Lady." Singing blues or jazz songs like "Death Letter" and "Gloomy Sunday," Ms. Galas sometimes emoted so heavily that blues fatalism gave way to the self-parody she's always willing to risk.