CATALAN DIVA : CABALLE SINGS MIXED PROGRAM AT ROYCE HALL

Montserrat Caballe was never the sort of artist who could sweep an audience away with temperamental gusto. Nor was she the sort of soprano who lavished much energy on the quest for interpretive profundity.

In her best days, however, she could sing like an angel.

She commanded a big, luscious lyric soprano notable for its shimmering silver edge, its unmistakable clarity and purity. She sang without obvious strain and stress, mustered coloratura flights with elegance and floated the most ravishing high pianissimo tones this side of Zinka Milanov.

At 54, she isn’t quite the vocal paragon of yore. She tends, these days, to sing either very loud or very soft. The bridge is damaged.

She also tends to approach extreme top notes--the few she still dares attempt--with gingerly caution at one dynamic extreme or with explosive desperation at the other. Control seems a matter of chance.

Such limitations can be problematic in the opera house, where Caballe’s phlegmatic appearances have become increasing rarities. In the concert hall, however, one can select a program that stresses strengths and circumvents weaknesses. The prima donna from Barcelona did just that, most of the time, Sunday night at Royce Hall, UCLA.

Although she attracted an audience that seemed to fill only two-thirds of the 1,800 available seats, she proved herself an abiding mistress of the siren song. The fans responded accordingly.

Concentrating on mid-range challenges, most of them languid, she sounded remarkably fresh and suave. Even with the visually disruptive crutch of her ubiquitous music stand--memorization apparently is not her forte--she left no doubt regarding her savoir-faire and authority. Here is a diva who knows what she wants.

For warm-up exercises, she turned to five artful diversions from the Italian Baroque. She sang generally droopy music of Gasparini, Paisiello, Giordani, Vivaldi and Marcello as if the composers and inherent sentiments were interchangeable. Nevertheless, she sustained refinement of articulation, demonstrated a seamless legato, ornamented the line with discretion and point.

Next came something that the either snooty or illiterate program booklet identified as “piccola pausa.” Soon, no doubt, we will need supertitles to identify a short pause.

To end the first half of the recital, Caballe brought nice, muted brio to three relatively obscure Rossini arias. The best known, “Di tanti palpiti” from “Tancredi,” joined the agenda when luggage containing her scores was destroyed in an airport fire. That, at any rate, was what she seemed to tell us in an apologetic little speech.

After intermission, she brought rare urgency to the incantations of Ravel’s “Trois melodies hebraiques,” in honor of the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death.

Finally, she exulted in music that allows her to relax, even to unleash a little charm. The demands of Obradors, Martinez-Palomo and Chapi may not be complex, but Caballe met them with the flair and disarming conviction of a believer to the manner born.

The predictable encores included a Catalan song, a zarzuela ditty, “Io son l’umile ancella” from “Adriana Lecouvreur,” and “O, mio babbino caro” from “Gianni Schicchi.”

Miguel Zanetti provided piano accompaniments predicated on sympathy rather than precision or expressive impetus.

UCLA, that model of academic enlightenment, provided no annotations, no original-language texts and translations that ranged from the inept to the incomprehensible.