Pop and Jazz Reviews : Lanz’s Dreamy Show at Royce Hall

David Lanz made it easy for his listeners at UCLA’s Royce Hall Saturday night. “Everybody should fall asleep at least once,” he said, “at a New Age concert.”

As it turned out, there were several prime opportunities to follow up on his advice, especially during the program’s second half, when he played such low-voltage pieces as “Leaves In the Seine” and “Dream of the Forgotten Child.”

More often, however, Lanz’s amiable platform style and occasionally catchy melodies kept things moving at a bright enough pace to avoid any tendency toward drowsiness.

Wearing a flowing silk poet’s shirt, his long, graying hair touching his shoulders, his Byronesque profile perfectly catching the carefully planned lighting, Lanz had the look and manner of a marquee virtuoso. If the white-key sameness and rhythmic regularity of his music tended to belie his neo-Lisztian presence, no one in the audience seemed to worry much about the disparity.

Lanz played most of his familiar works--”Cristofori’s Dream,” “Crane,” his interpretations of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and a medley of the other high points in his nine-recording catalogue.

An encore attempt at the blues was a mistake. As a performer who virtually defines both the pluses and minuses of commercial New Age music, Lanz is at his best not with rhythm tunes but when he successfully manages to hold his audience poised in the suspended moments between wakefulness and slumber.