Music Reviews : Kathleen Battle at Ambassador Auditorium

Kathleen Battle’s recital at Ambassador Auditorium on Thursday was more ritual than musical event.

Calculation marked every aspect of an evening made excessively lengthy by a late start, applause by the huge, indiscriminately adoring audience after each of the program’s 20-some segments, and a regal sameness of delivery in material by Purcell, Schubert, Strauss, Rodrigo, Donizetti, Lehar, or spirituals.

Frequent whispered exchanges with her obedient pianist, Phillip Moll--instructions to play even more softly and slowly?--proved distracting, as did the singer’s facial and physical choreography, which turned every song (and, with greater justification, Norina’s ditty from “Don Pasquale”) into an operatic scena.

Since the 1950s heyday of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the recital stage has seen very few with Battle’s combination of vocal and physical allure. And Battle once possessed a quality Schwarzkopf could never convey, a winning interpretive directness.

But while Schwarzkopf frequently played to the gallery, her narcissism was mitigated by an inescapable touch of self-mockery. Battle’s narcissism comes across as the unsullied, unmitigated real thing.

Which is not to say that her vocalism was anything less than dazzling Thursday. Tones were optimally polished, pitch unassailable. She delivered exquisite high pianissimos in Schubert’s “Nacht und Traume” and vocal steel to match the velvet in “Gretchen am Spinnrade.” But the latter, like most of the program, lacked verbal edge (consonants rarely sounded) and rhythmic incisiveness. The music just seemed to swim.

The best of Battle emerged in the florid songs, where one could appreciate her limitless facility and not be troubled about dramatic communication: a Purcell Alleluia and Richard Strauss’ “Amor,” baby-sister to Zerbinetta’s aria in “Ariadne auf Naxos.”