The versatile Thoms (she is the only graduate of the Australian National University School of Music to complete a Jazz BMus Performance degree with first-class honours in classical performance) will be ringing the elegant venue's rafters with songs and arias that were jewels of Melba's repertoire.

Melba herself may well be there in spirit because she has strong Canberra connections. For one thing, she warbled the national anthem, God Save the King, at the royalty enriched official 1927 opening of Canberra's new Parliament House (alas, she was a bit drowned out by planes brought in for an aerial display). Then as well, she came away from that experience of our infant city with strong, supportive ideas about it.

More of her idealistic Canberra ideas in a moment, but first this column warbles that Sunday's concert with the Canberra Choral Society promises to bristle with fun and poignancy. It is being directed by Tobias Cole and so, as we've come to expect from him, there will even be some audience participation, with all of us there to be invited to sing two hymns and also God Save the King.

The program uses songs and arias from various stages of Melba's career and also begins and ends with works sung and played at her funeral. And Melba herself will have the last word on Sunday, when the concert ends with a crackling 1923 phonograph recording of her singing the lugubrious but beguiling O For the Wings of a Dove.

In Sunday's concert, while Melba-Ms Thoms rests her voice, the choristers will sing some of the most tuneful old opera chorus warhorses ever written. Some are not so much old warhorses as the Black Caviars of their genre. One of the concert's Black Caviars is the Pilgrim's Chorus from Wagner's Tannhäuser.

Melba was Australia's first true superstar. It was not only that people thought her voice supernaturally lovely but also that as an Australian who had triumphed in sophisticated Europe in something so fabulous as grand opera, she did adolescent Australia's self-esteem a power of good.

She warbled the national anthem at Parliament House on May 9, 1927. Then on July 7 that year, the Adelaide Register rejoiced that ''Australia's new capital city, Canberra, has found a firm friend in Dame Nellie Melba, who, in the following charming article visualises Canberra as one of the world's finest cities''.

In that article, Melba said: ''Canberra spells Romance. Not the romance of the past, which comes from dusty buildings and faded memories, but the more vigorous romance of youth.

''But before that romance can be turned into reality, before the city of which I dream can come down from the clouds, there are many stern facts to be faced. Firstly, we must not expect Canberra to be a success at once.

We must be prepared to be informed that it is a white elephant, a useless expense. And I would ask good Australians, when they hear such criticism, to remember the beginnings of another great capital, Washington! Americans sneered at this upstart town, way back in the wilds. Yet today it is the centre of all that is best in culture in the United States …

''I can think of so many little suggestions by which Canberra may be made beautiful. I should like to see houses springing up, roofed with those gay green tiles which are used with such happy effect in California. I should like to see corrugated iron banished for ever from Australia. And as far as the houses themselves were concerned, I would welcome that complete simplicity which is so much more difficult to obtain than the excessive ornamentation of many Australian houses.

''This is our Big Chance. I am no town planner. I am only a woman, with a certain sense of beauty, and perhaps a little more knowledge of the great world than most of my countrywomen have been able to gain. But I can say this -that we have here a tremendous opportunity, an opportunity of spirit. Here is a city which must come to typify an ideal. That ideal is the unity of Australia.''

In discussion with this columnist yesterday, Thoms emerged as a great Melba fan.

''How could you not be? It would be un-Australian!''

Melba was a presence in Thoms' home growing up, with her father a singer and a Melba enthusiast and even a collector of ''bits and pieces of Melba memorabilia''. She remembers ''scratchy old recordings'' of Melba playing in the house. She's enthusiastic about Melba, not just for her voice but for her having been ''a bit of a women's libber, a bit before her time, making a great career for herself in what's always been and still is a male-dominated, sexist industry''.

On Sunday she's not going to be trying to impersonate Melba but ''I'm certainly going to wear a diva gown. In honour of Melba!''

The Dame Nellie - A Concert in Her Memory occasion is at the Albert Hall at 3pm.

Tickets are available through Canberra Ticketing or at the door.