A private viewing and dinner Tuesday celebrated the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Contemporary Voices: Works from The UBS Art Collection,” which opens Friday.

It was a lavish affair with caviar, Champagne, and huge baskets of perfectly blanched spears of asparagus. Renee Fleming and the Verbier Festival Orchestra gave a special performance, and a memento program, with a Chuck Close “Self-Portrait” on the cover, was handed out.

The 300 guests included big guns from UBS and the museum’s board, as well as artists and other distinguished social figures wearing their finest jewelry, gowns, and black bowties.

But the man of the hour was the vice chairman of the museum and the person responsible for the contemporary art in the UBS Art Collection, Donald Marron.

“Since we spend a third of our lives in our offices, shouldn’t we have something interesting to look at?” Mr. Marron said in remarks during dinner, held in the second-floor atrium that bears his name (along with his wife’s, Catherine Marron, who is chairwoman of another elite cultural institution, the New York Public Library).

Mr. Marron formed the collection over a 30-year period at PaineWebber, where he last served as chief executive, before it was acquired by the Swiss financial services firm UBS in 2001. (He now heads up Light-year Capital.)

UBS has embraced the collection, agreeing to honor Mr. Marron’s arrangement to donate more than 40 works to the museum and sponsoring the new exhibition, curated by Anne Temkin, as well as co-hosting Tuesday night’s with the museum.

UBS Chairman Marcel Ospel (himself a collector and former member of the Guggenheim Museum’s board) told guests that the collection speaks well for the firm and embodies a spirit that Francophiles call “epater le bourgeois.”

He also placed the firm’s commitment to art in historical context. “In fact, it was bankers … like the Medicis in Florence and the Fuggers in Augsburg … who made possible much of the splendor of the Renaissance.”

The festivities seemed akin to the grand entertainments held at the courts of Renaissance aristocrats. After the Verbier Orchestra welcomed entering guests by playing in the lobby, a trumpet fanfare announced the start of dinner. To cap off the evening, Ms. Fleming performed Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate and excerpts from Handel oratorios “Samson,” “Alexander Balus,” and, most appropriate to the mood of the event, “Endless Pleasure” from “Semele.”

In keeping with modern taste and Swiss efficiency, Glorious Food served a simple meal: gravlax, pot-au-feu, and Apple Charlotte, washed down with St. Aubin Blanc, Le Ban (Prudhon), 2000, Cotes du Rhone, Terres Saintes, 2001, and Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin.

Those who supped at tables covered with peach cloths and peach roses included Texan Carroll Petrie, in shimmering white; Clarissa Bronfman, in a gold top, choreographer Jane Comfort, and collector Herbert Newman.