Pop Music Reviews : McKennitt Artful at Schoenberg Hall

Popular music doesn’t have too many exponents like Loreena McKennitt. By her own admission on Friday at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall, the Canadian singer is a frustrated veterinarian who looks for hit-single inspiration in the “Norton Anthology of English Poetry” (no, she hasn’t found it yet).

She’s the sort of artist who describes certain songs as “emanating” from her most recent album, “The Visit,” and although she sticks to harp and piano, the instruments played by the members of her band (whom she called “Porsches idling on stage”) ranged from electric guitar to sitar, fiddle to synthesizer.

McKennitt’s adventurous mix of New Age stylings, earthy folk and traditional Celtic music came across somewhere between chamber music and the highbrow rock of groups like Steeleye Span and Renaissance. But McKennitt heeds no boundaries in choosing and crafting her art. “Greensleeves” has survived a million piano recitals to re-emerge, in McKennitt’s hands and voice, as a vital, achingly gorgeous tale of love lost. And poetry by Tennyson and Shakespeare was given somber, generous musical accompaniment to fine effect.