Chamber Orchestra benefits from Domingo's charisma

A benefit concert whose lure is a 68-year-old tenor. A very serious music director whose interests lie more in Berg and Beethoven than "I Could Have Danced All Night." And an audience with repertoire expectations diverging far from the specialty of the orchestra they are about to hear.

It sounds like a recipe for disaster, and yet Monday night's Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia benefit concert was a curious triumph.

The most powerful musical experiences happen when everyone in the room is there for the same reason, so it was fortunate that the Chamber Orchestra was able to present one of music's great unifying forces: Plácido Domingo.

It was striking, too, to hear Domingo in such gorgeous form. There might have been a few worrisome moments (one song with questionable intonation, a brief bald spot in the tenor's tone) in the opening of a two-hour-plus Verizon Hall program he shared with soprano Ana María Martínez. And the decision to amplify the singers and orchestra and send their sound through overhead speakers created the illusion of lip-synching and had me searching memory for reasons the city spent more than $275 million to build a new concert hall.

But to dwell on such thoughts would have been to miss the rare and almost miraculous combination of qualities that accounts for Domingo's charisma. With a low-key but self-assured saunter, he moved about the stage in operatic excerpts from Massenet, Cilea, and Wagner - and later Lehár, Bernstein, and other light works.

He has that thing in his voice that makes listeners know he cares urgently for the music. To Cilea's "Lamento di Federico" from L'arlesiana he brought a good deal of pain. His sound shimmered with refinement and a cheery ardor in "Winterstürme" from Die Walküre, Wagner's love song to spring.

He was a judicious server of schmaltz in "Dein ist mein ganzes Herz" from Lehár's Das Land des Lächelns, giving a loud twist of sound at the end that made the audience cheer. He knew it would do that, they knew he knew, and everyone was happy.

Sensing what the audience wants - a quality useful in his day job as general director of both the Washington National Opera and LA Opera - is key to his success, and Monday night he was in top form. Popular tunes? Sure. Another encore? Of course. Sly, intimate glances to the audience? The pleasure was all his.

Chamber Orchestra officials yesterday said that what all this contributed to the bottom line of the ensemble remained to be seen.

It seems the only members of the near-capacity crowd who didn't get everything they wanted were a few in the conductor's circle behind the stage who flashed cameras throughout the first half. Digital photography has spawned a new breed of rudeness, which involves not only disrupting the performance, but then turning to your neighbor to discuss the image you both experienced just seconds earlier. At least one photographer was foiled by security at intermission, and her photos were deleted from her camera.

Chamber Orchestra music director Ignat Solzhenitsyn, had the night off - this wasn't his kind of program - and on the podium in his stead was Eugene Kohn, a frequent Domingo collaborator.

You had to feel for soprano Martínez. She's a very fine singer, and, occupying almost every other song slot, she impressed with a rich, saturated sound and a well-honed expressive sense. It was the fact that she couldn't trade on Domingo's 4½-decade relationship with audiences that made her a less luminous presence on stage, not any intrinsic lack of ability.

But Domingo wasn't going to let her presence flag without extending a gracious hand. He got an encore - a "Bésame Mucho" addled with a disco beat - that made the audience roar, and then let her do an encore. In the end he embraced her for more Lehár - "The Merry Widow Waltz," cueing the audience that it was their turn to take the familiar tune.