MUSIC REVIEW : MALFITANO IN RECITAL AT ROYCE HALL

Back when New York City Opera made annual visits to the Music Center, Catherine Malfitano was familiar locally--as a sweetly bereft Mimi and a reckless hedonist of a Manon.

Since then the Met beckoned. She went on to consolidate her fortunes there, but returned three years ago to the Southland opera stage to sing a daringly punkish, nearly pornographic, brilliant Poppea for Long Beach.

Coming to Malfitano’s recital Friday at Royce Hall, UCLA, at least one listener had high expectations.

And, in many regards, she did not disappoint. Malfitano easily commands the poise and freedom of an accomplished actress. She knows what to wear to project woman-of-the-world sophistication--a slinky gown of black and purple spangles, her hair sleeked into an artsy chignon. She knows how to move and gesture and stand and look.

Yet, a sameness characterized her approach to the agenda of mostly 20th-Century music, with William Vendice the authoritative piano accompanist. Whether singing Rodrigo, Wolf, Barber, Satie or Poulenc, she stayed generally at the dynamic level of mezzo-forte. And that operatic inclination kept the singer from giving intimately scaled, and thus more poetic, readings of her material.

The voice was certainly strong, notwithstanding a somewhat reedy, nasal sound at the beginning and one bit of difficulty at the end of Wolf’s “Im Fruehling.” No longer as pure, it now has an amplitude that lends dramatic dimension.

There were generous outpourings right from the opening Rodrigo group, which Malfitano put across with the proper Spanish verve. But despite her remarkable stagecraft and aplomb--holding a mood between songs, eyeing the audience with specific, varying intent--she did not make the ultimate connections between text and music that distinguish the great Lied artists.

With all the wonderful facial punctuations she devised for Barber’s “Hermit Songs,” her interpretations were much too “sung” for maximal impact. And Satie’s “Je te veux,” to which Elly Ameling (on this same stage two weeks ago) brought an exquisite, heartful sense of nostalgia, came across as a generalized blowup.

But when Malfitano reprised Mimi with her first encore, “Addio senza rancor,” she finally demonstrated what a vocal thrill is all about. For some, the opera and recital stages are not interchangeable.