Price Opens UCLA Recital Season : Music: The celebrated diva delivers a masterly recital nearly six years after her operatic retirement.

Nearly six years after her retirement from the operatic stage, Leontyne Price continues to tour as a recitalist and soloist with orchestra. Thank goodness.

But goodness may have not a lot to do with it. Solid technique, a gift for communication and her status as a beloved American soprano, an icon, if you will, are three of the strong reasons the celebrated singer from Mississippi still delights and touches her audiences.

Musical integrity is another important element in Price’s arsenal of artistic resources. At her return to UCLA, Saturday night in Royce Hall, the 63-year-old soprano--looking radiant, svelte and youthful in matching gowns, sherbet green before intermission, True Blue after--Price gave another object lesson in constructing and executing a masterly recital.

Some of the composers with whom she has been associated--Handel, Mozart and Verdi in arias at crucial junctures of the program, Richard Strauss, Joseph Marx and Lee Hoiby in song groups, Gershwin and Puccini in encores--surfaced, of course. Yet the program, despite a few familiar points, was a new one, and performed with freshness and zest. As always.

Yes, and as at her Orange County appearance two years ago, Price now occasionally shows signs of being past her prime, vocally: less available breath for longer lines; a decrease in ease of production; some unclear enunciation; momentary loss of sound-control, resulting in tones that can become raw, hollow or strident.

Fortunately, these remain on the outskirts of artistic achievement. Beautiful, communicative singing is what we have long expected, and received, from this singer. And that is what she produced on Saturday with the solid and admirable support of pianist David Garvey, her musical associate for these 35 years.

For connoisseurs, perhaps most memorable was the emotional impact in two songs by Marx, Strauss and Hoiby, in particular Hoiby’s thrilling “Wild Nights,” “Goodby, Goodby World” and “There Came a Wind Like a Bugle.”