A New Season, A new ERA

Classical musicians have long felt a sense of entitlement about their art that makes them uneasy playing for their supper. Bach, we know from his letters, groveled, but it wasn’t too many years later that Mozart griped about and Beethoven rebelled against patronage. The tone was set.

Still, the fact remains that patronage of some sort is essential for an orchestra. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s annual gala concert, held the night before the season opens as a benefit for the orchestra’s pension fund, is directed toward one segment of modern patronage--high society.

The formula is simple: Make the programming unchallenging as possible (and also as fast, cheap and easy to rehearse as possible), and snare a crowd-drawing soloist.

It is, in some ways, a curious formula. The social set, which arrives at 7 for the concert, can become understandably restless, since dinner isn’t until the party afterward. And musical attention is too easily drawn away from the orchestra and its music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, to the star soloist, as was the case Wednesday with Kathleen Battle at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Battle fascinates us. We don’t understand her. We have all heard about the tantrums that sound too bizarre and irrational to accept at face value. But she also can appear so unnatural on stage that one is constantly trying to analyze her state of mind. It can be terribly distracting, especially because there is greatness in her singing.

This time Battle appeared in a lime Jell-O gown, with a mile-long purple sash. She wore her hair tall. And her mannerisms were more painfully pronounced than ever. Battle is a beautiful woman, but the coy, girlish way she sang Mozart’s “Esultate Jubilate” is no longer appropriate in gesture or voice for a middle age she ignores.

Those incomparable silvery pianissimos still float, the line and texture are ever gorgeous. But the voice is not as light as it once was, and more support is needed than in her youth. She would do us all a favor by not pretending that it isn’t, rather than flirting and gasping.

Not all of Battle’s antics, on stage or off, are petty ones, however. She surely must have applied her brand of special leverage to get Andre Previn’s “Honey and Rue” included on the program. Previn left the Philharmonic as its music director in an angry dispute with management, and he has not been welcomed back. But it was going too far that his association with the orchestra, which was hardly a disgrace, wasn’t even credited in the insufficiently small program note.

The song cycle, written for Battle in 1992 and performed for the first time in Los Angeles, is a jewel, one of Previn’s finest scores. The texts by Toni Morrison are deep and unsettling, a black woman’s experiences in a sometimes cold, sometimes warm world. Previn’s music--a little jazz, a little bittersweet Americana--is adaptable and fits the moods. It also elevates all that is brilliant in Battle’s voice and manner. Here, the soprano also was steady and satisfying. Words and tone were true, spellbinding.

Salonen, for his part, was the gracious accompanist, and the Philharmonic responded to Previn’s lyric lines and urbane jazz as if with a second sense for it. Could that have even been affection we were hearing in the playing?

The symphony portion of the program was a throwaway. Salonen opened with Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, as hard and tight, maybe a bit tighter interpretively but not as tidily played, as it had been last spring on the subscription concerts. The concert concluded with the two brief, popular highlights from Sibelius’ “Lemminkainen Legends,” which is being given in full in this week’s subscription concerts. We’ll save consideration of it until then, except to mention that the Philharmonic sounded here like the band everyone is talking about.