PREVIN CONDUCTS : BATTLE SINGS MOZART WITH PHILHARMONIC

There were no historical relationships between the first and second halves of the Los Angeles Philharmonic program conducted by Andre Previn in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Thursday night. The lack of unity tended to leave Mozart and Vaughan Williams each suspended in space, the first lightly, the second weightily.

Mozart’s cause was advanced by Kathleen Battle’s singing of the concert aria “Vorrei, spiegarvi, o Dio!” K. 418, and the three-movement motet “Exsultate, Jubilate,” K. 165.

There are moments when Battle’s singing approaches a Mozart ideal. The very quality of the voice suggests heavenly purity; it could be depicting the fires of hell and it would still have the sound of winged angels. One might wish now and then for darker colors and more forceful rhetoric, yet the ear is never less than entranced by the pearly Battle tones, or less than delighted by the security of her florid technique and the accuracy of her intonation. The audience conveyed vehement approval.

Previn’s contribution to this kleine Mozartfest was the Symphony No. 1 in E-flat, K. 16, said to have been written when the composer was 9. It is both pretty and a precocious piece, already identifiable as the work of genius. Previn would have done better to let it speak simply, rather than with the intervention he always seems to feel necessary for Mozart. Colorless and barely audible pianissimos are constantly sandwiched between comparatively violent orchestral outbursts, leaving a succession of empty holes in the fabric.

This same oddity of aural disjointedness plagued Previn’s otherwise authoritative reading of Vaughan Williams’ “A London Symphony.” It had a way of falling between unpleasantly loud, brassy sections and vaguely soft and unclearly defined episodes. There was little middle ground.

As a piece of illustrative writing, the symphony could have done with some verbal assistance. How is an audience expected to know that the little viola solo so hauntingly played by Heiichiro Ohyama in the second movement represents the desolation of an old street musician fiddling in the twilight before a Bloomsbury pub? Or how, unassisted, can the listener identify the street cries or coster jigs?

The usual way out of this dilemma is to print the analysis, unauthorized by the composer, by Albert Coates, the conductor of the first revised performance of the symphony in London. But it would not have helped the Philharmonic audience on Thursday, plunged as it always is in the darkness of night while music is being played. Program notes are a waste in this provincial Stygian gloom.