MUSIC REVIEW : THE KING’S SINGERS AT AMBASSADOR

“We’ve often been accused of murdering the classics,” Jeremy Jackman of the King’s Singers told the audience at Ambassador Auditorium at encore time on Tuesday. “So we’d like to do it some more.” Whereupon the unaccompanied sextet dove into a hilarious buzzing version of “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

No harm in having fun with music, of course, as long as it’s done with taste. And the singers--countertenors Jackman and Alastair Hume, tenor Bob Chilcott, baritones Anthony Holt and Simon Carrington and bass Colin Mason--took great care in separating the wheat (folk song settings and madrigals) from the chaff (two silly, commissioned works--a Marx Brothers “detective opera” with props, and some confessional outpourings by Gian Carlo Menotti).

But what made everything work was the group’s unflagging artistry. The madrigals received impeccably balanced and enunciated readings. Menotti’s brow-beating “Composer at Work” (“Blank page. Empty head,” it solemnly begins) proved amusing despite its heavy-handedness. The vaudevillian “opera”--”Sir Harry North’s Last Case” by Carl Davis and William Rushton--was delivered with conviction and only minimal mugging. A collection of pop ditties (the program was part of the Pops Series at Ambassador) benefitted from inventive arrangements and, as always, dead-center pitch.

More serious-minded concertgoers might complain about a lack of substance. Detective slapstick has been done to, uh, death of late (e.g. American Ballet Theatre’s “Murder”), and a little Frustrated-Artist routine goes a long way, particularly in the unrelentingly precious manner of Menotti.

Yet the Singers’ six golden voices made one forgive such trivial pursuits, as they elevated everything they touched to an exalted level. Even the smallest of trifles received the greatest of attention--the final encore, for example.

James Taylor’s “That Lonesome Road” is a gentle a capella song of little particular lyrical originality or depth. But in the King’s Singers performance, it emerged positively stirring.

The term pops was simply insufficient here.