Singer's sonic purity, orchestra's lushness

You can keep those waltzes and polkas. This New Year's Eve, the Philadelphia Orchestra imported Audra McDonald.

In their annual glamour grab, a lot of American orchestras have appropriated Vienna for this night. Passing the last few hours of the year with Strauss and Straus has its old-country pleasures, though like a lot of folk music, doing it right is trickier than it sounds. It's really a kind of swing, and it doesn't belong to us.

What our indigenous ensembles do have, or should, is an ear for American popular song, and the sound of McDonald on Thursday night in Verizon Hall against all that Philadelphia Orchestra lushness made your heart beat faster, especially in the Gershwin tunes.

The actress and singer has a love of sonic purity. She makes a song her own not by way of liberal interpretation, but by intensifying the composer's intentions.

Her strengths render powerless the risk of cliché. Wisely, she approached Arlen/Harburg's "Over the Rainbow" not by starting at the chorus, as most do, but with the rarely heard verse - accompanied only by the sensitive acoustic guitar of Kevin Kuhn. "Moon River" could have been the stuff of kitsch, but in a touched-by-dissonance orchestration by Lee Musiker, Mancini gained a glistening, nocturnal edge.

That McDonald is a technician of the highest order was clear with the machine-gun-fast triplets of Loesser's "Can't Stop Talking About Him." The orchestra had plenty of material, perhaps too much, on its own - Gershwin's An American in Paris, the "Three Dance Episodes" from Bernstein's On the Town. Rossen Milanov was conducting, and the material often sounded underrehearsed. I hope to never again hear the Philadelphia Orchestra as raggedy and out of its element as it was in the Robert Russell Bennett orchestration of the Overture to Gershwin's Girl Crazy.

The sold-out concert was a strange paradox. Twice, McDonald had to restart the orchestra after bad starts (one her fault, the other perhaps shared). The evening was littered with sloppy or false orchestra entrances and sections playing out of sync.

Yet McDonald's ease and wit was the larger presence, and when the group could fall back on its traditional sound and soft, kitteny mews, the package was luxuriant. Gershwin's "Ask Me Again" was as if written for this ensemble in an arrangement by Ted Sperling and orchestration of Bruce Coughlin.

Anyone who left after the program indicated McDonald was finished missed a 10-minute bonus: Arlen's "Ain't It de Truth" from Jamaica, and "May You Always," the popular song by Larry Markes and Dick Charles that mingles with "Auld Lang Syne." Nothing boozy or sentimental in her view of the tune, which traditionally sends audiences into the cold New Year's Eve air in an odd state of melancholy. Instead, McDonald's purity and sweetness gifted her listeners with a sense of renewal, which is really the only sensible way to straddle a difficult year and the hope that lies just around the corner.